SideQuest

• 

  thumbnail

Inspiration

SideQuest was inspired by the desire to make everyday life more fun, social, and engaging. We wanted to bring arcades into real life, emulating the same sense of excitement and challenge that classic arcades bring. We wanted to create a platform that encourages people to step outside their comfort zones, explore their surroundings, interact with friends in a way that feels like a game, and be well. Drawing inspiration from arcade-style challenges, SideQuest transforms social interaction into an adventure.

What it does

SideQuest is a social app that helps users connect with their friends and others in their area by completing "quests"—tasks that encourage exploration, creativity, and engagement with the world around them. Users can take photos as proof of completing a quest, earning points and badges while competing on leaderboards. Quests can be solo or collaborative, making SideQuest a fun way to challenge friends or meet new people.

How we built it

We developed SideQuest using Typescript for a smooth mobile experience, integrating Firebase for authentication, user data storage, and real-time updates. The app’s arcade-style visuals and interactive UI were designed using Figma to create a nostalgic gaming experience, reinforcing the feeling of embarking on real-life adventures. The GPT API was used to generate quests, complete with different point values based on the difficulty of each task.

Challenges we ran into

In designing the project, we hoped to make quests feel fun and organic while still being tailored to the user, and we ended up using the GPT API in order to generate quests that had varying levels of difficulty as well as different types of social involvement. We also were challenged by how to design quests that were properly spaced out in time, with daily quests refreshing and in order to keep users engaged with the app.

What we learned

From this hackathon experience, we learned the importance of engagement in keeping an app fun and interactive, considering different aspects of the user experience, from the design of the interface to the actual quests themselves. We also learned how to integrate Firebase to allow for real-time updates for users and to create their social networks within the game.

Built With

• firebase
• gpt
• typescript