UCscavenger

Inspiration

The idea for this project came about in November. We were overwhelmed by how daunting exploring the campus seemed. It felt like there was just so much to explore, with so little incentive to go to see most of it. Replicating systems we had seen in some of our favorite video games, we decided to create a game of sorts that encourages students to explore their campus, and gives them a reason to do so.

What it does

Gives students location-based quests to complete. To complete the quest, the student must input a location-specific piece of trivia that they will find at the location. Completing quests will reward the player with custom-drawn slug avatars that they can set as their profile photo on the app.

How we built it

First, we obtained a website domain from GoDaddy. Then, we used HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create all of the actual website's content. Art for the website was created on Photoshop, and imported in.

Challenges we ran into

One of the largest challenges we ran into was getting past UCSC's secure encrypted Wifi. Initially, the Wifi was blocking all connections to our website, as it was flagged as not secure. Another challenge we faced was figuring out cookies and saving across pages. As none of us had any experience with these, it was a difficult task to complete.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The profile page is probably our biggest accomplishment. Getting the profile photo select menu to work was a great challenge, and took the most time out of anything on the project. Another big accomplishment was the tracking of quest completion across pages. Getting the progress to stick was something that seemed simple, but proved to be quite difficult. However, it turned out exactly how we wanted it to.