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Garden
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Start
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Quests
Background
It should go without saying, finding ways to get Zoomers and Gen A to be interested in gardening is a big challenge. We are guilty of this ourselves as we choose to burn time (and often money) on mobile games instead of enjoying the outdoors.
RPGrass
RPGrass gamifies the process of building a personal garden, capturing the interest of our current generation which is glued to their phones.
The idea is that the user goes on quests to buy the materials needed to build a garden, rewarding them with experience points and unlockables as they progress.
From small succulents to large raised beds, RPGrass can accommodate gardens of any size and encourage a healthy relationship with your plants.
Most important of all you can give your plants a name! :)
The team
Andre (PixelToast)
Andre is a Full-Stack Software Engineer and Entrepreneur, with some experience in project management. He is currently working at a fintech startup that is building a mobile app.
Evelyn (Lunipop)
Evelyn is a homeschool student who is learning how to program and is especially interested in game making and app design.
Agon (Agondev)
Just a jack of all trades code monkey. Coffee consumer by day, Flutter dev by night.
Bishwajeet (2002Bishwajeet)
Bishwajeet a.k.a Biswa is a Flutter developer and a beginner in everything related to hackathon. He has some experience in making apps dealing the front-end part but for rest he is an absolute beginner now.
How we built RPGrass
Most of us met on Discord for the first time during the hackathon, we spent the first two hours brainstorming ideas. Once deciding on RPGrass we created a GitHub organization, figma design, logo, and a repository to hold the code.
During the 36 hours the entire team collaborated on the project contributing code and assets. Since we are international and have different schedules most of the communication happened in text.
Andre, Bishwajeet, and Agon have some previous experience in making Flutter apps so this was the framework we chose to build the game.
The technical process for creating the app was fairly standard, we created views based on figma designs and linked them with data models. Flutter is unique in that everything in the application is defined by code, all of the pages were written by hand without any visual editing tools or templates.
The app is created primarily for mobile, but it's possible to build it for web.
On the project we use strict linting options and sound null safety, these prevent bugs and ensure the highest level of code quality.
Challenges
One of the first challenges we ran into is how to work on the same codebase at the same time, this ended in us having to learn how to manage merge conflicts and effectively communicating the files we are working on.
Another technical challenge was state management, we needed to follow a pattern of code that is maintainable in the long-term but doesn't slow us down and prevent us from finishing in time.
Accomplishments
Overall this was a very fun project for all of us, we got a lot of work done and learned a ton about working in a team. It also brought out a bigger appreciation of the presence of technology in gardening.
- During the hackathon Andre learned how to use the Riverpod architecture in a Flutter app and how it can be used in collaborative environment.
- Evelyn learned how to use Git to pull information from and push changes to a project correctly, set up an app development environment, how to use an IDE, and how to design a logo.
- Agon: The sky's not the limit. Collaboration on the same codebase isn't a given.
- Biswa learned how to work as a team, how to review others code and use best practices while writing code. He also learned more about state management and how to use the Riverpod architecture.
Next steps
After the hackathon some of us may re-visit RPGrass and use it at a pitching event, do a case study with friends and family, or just keep working on it as a fun side project.
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