Inspiration

The idea of "Six Degrees of Separation" says that every person on Earth is connected to anyone else through at most 6 mutual friends. This made me wonder, how far do you have to go to connect any two artists?

What it does

The Feature Chain is a game where you connect two musicians through their common collaborators and producers, revealing just how intertwined music is.

How we built it

To start, I compiled a dataset of the top 250 most streamed artists, then expanded outward by pulling each artist's catalog and branching out to features and collabs on their songs. Next, I implemented the Breadth First Search (BFS) algorithm to find the shortest path between any two artists. Finally, I built the UI to make the experience intuitive and visually clean.

Challenges we ran into

The dataset was enormous, causing significant memory issues and making it difficult to find a reliable way to get collaboration data, especially since no major platform (like Spotify or Apple Music) publicly gives that information. The custom game and daily challenge modes were also tricky, since I had to generate shareable links with encoded artists and ensure every player gets the same daily puzzle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud of how clean the UI turned out and of the finished product as a whole. It actually works the way I imagined it when I first had the idea.

What we learned

I learned a lot through this process, particularly how to implement BFS on areal life example and how to design a game that's easy to pick up but intricate.