Inspiration
We wanted to make studying feel like a fun game activity. But we know straight up turning it into a game wouldn't be effective as studying requires focus. Therefore we wanted to make a game with collecting companions in mind to act as a motivator and reward for studying. Inspired by Pokémon and gacha games, we've turned studying into part of a game.
What it does
StudyQuest is an AI-powered learning companion app. You pick a topic, and an AI tutor generates a structured lesson with an interactive Q&A at the end. Complete lessons to earn materials and resources, which you use to build and upgrade your island base, a Town Hall, Hospital, Blacksmith, and Lab. Pull companions through a gacha system, level them up, evolve their rarity, and send them on expeditions. When expeditions finish, you fight bosses in a turn-based ATB combat system where your companions' strength reflects how much you've studied. The more you learn, the stronger your team.
How we built it
We built the backend with FastAPI and SQLAlchemy on SQLite, using Claude to generate lessons and quiz questions dynamically. The frontend is a Flutter web app using Provider for state management and SharedPreferences for local game persistence. The game systems, gacha pulls, companion progression, expeditions, combat, and building upgrades, are all handled client-side to keep things snappy.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the AI to generate lessons that were both structured and genuinely useful took a lot of prompt iteration. Balancing the game loop so that studying felt rewarding rather than like a chore was harder than expected. On the technical side, building a full ATB combat engine in Flutter and managing layout across different screen sizes threw up more edge cases than we anticipated.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A fully working game loop from end to end, study a topic, earn rewards, upgrade your base, evolve your companions, and fight bosses. The gacha and companion evolution systems feel genuinely satisfying. We're also proud of how well the AI lesson generation turned out; it produces real, coherent content that adapts to whatever topic you throw at it.
What we learned
That the hardest part of edtech isn't the tech, it's the motivation problem. Gacha mechanics are powerful precisely because they make you care about something before you've earned it. We also learned a lot about Flutter state management at scale and how to structure a game loop cleanly in a cross-platform framework.
What's next for StudyQuest
Fleshing out the Blacksmith equipment system, adding multiplayer expeditions so friends can study together, expanding the companion roster and their unique abilities, and introducing a spaced repetition system so lessons revisit topics at the right time. Longer term, we'd love to support curriculum-aligned content so StudyQuest can be used for real exam prep.
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