Trial by Knowledge

Import your notes and take a quiz!

Inspiration

Our main inspiration was our countless sleepless nights spent studying redundant and dense material. On those trying nights, we all wish we could be doing pretty much anything else, including playing video games. So, the idea of gameifying our notes was born.

The game itself was inspired by WarioWare, a collection of short and incredibly repetitive minigames (called microgames). That concept aligned well with ours; quick repition is a good way to drill knowledge into our heads for exams.

What it does

The Unity game prompts the user for a text file, which is then read and sent to the GPT-3 API to be read, transformed into appropriate trivia-type questions, and returned as a whole set of playable material. The game can then work with the given questions in any engaging way it needs (our project only spotlights a few of the ways we thought of turning our notes into).

How we built it

Most of this project is built with Unity, but it gets a little help from node.js in order to make the API call to GPT-3. At first, we started by building the core of the Unity project together, learning to work with files and data within the engine. We later expanded into the Node project, tinkered with the possible outputs we could get from GPT-3 and worked on the Unity game accordingly, making minigames best suited to the questions it returned.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into many challenges, mostly while acquainting ourselves with Unity (surprisingly, the Node side of the project was quite straightforward). A lot of our issues were rooted in unforseen pitfalls in the design stage, like not planning far enough ahead to know what kind of scripts we would need, what kind of assets, our roles, etc.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Above all else, we are proud of how we overcame our challenges of debugging and designing together. Having second opinions certainly sped things up.

What we learned

We all definitely learned the value of good planning and debugging. Many headaches could've been avoided, but without those headaches maybe we wouldn't have learned...

What's next for Trial by Knowledge

This project has a lot of ways that it can go from here. The original idea of the project was inspired by the WarioWare games, so an expansion with more, smaller minigames that can be played in quick succession is a natural evolution for the game. Also, support for different file types and media types can open up more opportunities for the kinds of games we can play.