Side Quest

With Side Quest, we hope to incentivize exploration, friendship, and connection. Side Quest is designed to make campus exploration exciting and fun for all with unique challenges and thrilling quests.

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Inspiration

The inspiration for Side Quest began when one of the founding members ventured into the PMA's top floor and realized all the secret, hidden gems that UT has to offer. Ideating on this concept, Side Quest was created to gamify the act of discovering one's college campus through wacky quests and exciting challenges. More deeply, Side Quest is an app designed to bring people together and encourage connections between students on campus. Overall, Side Quest is designed to spark discovery, entertain, and unite students through a shared love of exploration.

What it does

At its core, Side Quest is a challenge-based app that offers users the ability to embark on quests, post completions to a network of friends, and compete on global leaderboards for awards.

Questing

Each quest consists of a task to incentivize students to explore UT's campus further, whether running a lap around Clark Field or attending a concert at Bass Hall. Quests can vary from a single task, such as simply visiting a location, to spending time in an area. Users can interact with these quests by making posts of their completions, liking other users' tasks, and sharing quests to friends.

Leaderboards

From completing quests, users will be placed on a global leaderboard and compete for digital awards. On these leaderboards, students can compete for prizes from objectives, including time spent, tasks completed, and more, for various buildings and locations on campus . Awards, whether becoming the GDC Gladiator or the Jendy's Jampion, can be displayed and flexed on each user's profile in their trophy case.

Statistics

Users can also view their personal statistics on their profile page. The profile section displays a heat-map of users' most frequently traveled locations on campus. Beyond that, users can view their daily quest streak, awards, quests completed, and recent activity. Users can also view a graph of the distribution of the locations that they are in throughout their time on Side Quest.

Community Engagement

Finally, Side Quest is more than just a questing platform, but its also a source of community engagement. Users can suggest quests for others to partake in or engage with others through comments. Side Quest is a free-flowing platform where students can come together in their appreciation for embarking on new journeys, completing challenges together, and embrace the beauty of discovering their college campus.

How we built it

We built this website using the React framework for the frontend and MongoDB, Express.js, and Node.js for the backend. We primarily programmed in JavaScript (JSX).

Challenges we ran into

Two of our team members were complete beginners in web development and the team as a whole had minimal experience building large-scale full-stack applications. We primarily had many issues involving setting up the environment such as setting up the server for MongoDB or deploying the website using Github Pages. Additionally, the team had little experience with UI/UX design and learned to use Figma in 2 hours, so creating an aesthetically pleasing website took considerable time and effort.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the effort that we put into this project and how we spent nearly all of our time across the duration of the Hackathon working on something that we are passionate about. Moreover, we are proud about the technical skills that we developed and our continuous teamwork through these 25 hours.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Web Development, both front-end and back-end, and overall became much more familiar with JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and MongoDB. We also learned about the difficulties and interesting facets of working on such a large project, especially with merging from 5+ branches. It was a great experience for us to familiarize ourselves with a large-scale Web project.

What's next for Side Quest

We hope to take Side Quest further and make it a mobile app as well as expanding to other college campuses outside of UT. We believe Side Quest can make difference in the world by bringing college student's together.

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