Vaygo Bingo

Snap! Shoot! Bingo! Your World is Your Game board.

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Inspiration

My wife and I love to travel and explore the world, and I love photography. Sometimes we are highly detailed in planning our travel plans but sometimes we want to be more spontaneous in our adventures and maybe role the dice a little. Additionally my wife and I are very competitive....

So one night while celebrating my wife's birthday in Vegas.... we had this idea for a photography based bingo game that would make the night a more random adventure.

What it does

Overview

Vaygo Bingo is a simple game to make solo or group outings more fun and spontaneous. Each game of Vaygo bingo starts with a 'Tile Pack' which is basically a list of places, actions, or things you might see. You can create your own tile packs or use one of our free or premium starter packs to get off and running more quickly.

We envision Vaygo being played at parties, family vacations, amusement parks, zoos, sports stadiums etc. You can literally turn anything into a fun game of Bingo.

Playing Vaygo

When you start a Vaygo game you get a randomized Bingo card created from the Tile pack you choose to play. If playing multiplayer each player gets their own randomized card. The basic game of Bingo is to get 5 in a row, but more adventures individuals will play 'Black Out' and mark off all their squares.

Unlike the 'Normal' game of Bingo, instead of waiting for someone to yell out your number, you get to explore the real world and look for your bingo tiles and capture pictures!

Social Influences and Decision Making

If playing solo, your bingo deck will influence decisions you make on what to do because you want to get 5 in a row. If playing with a group there is an even more fun social dynamic because you will all be trying to get 5 in a row and will have to sell your plan for the night.

Adding Strategy

Wanting to add a little more strategy to the simple game of Vaygo, we added a shuffle button. The shuffle button allows you to shuffle your game board. The shuffle will shuffle all tiles that you have not already placed a photo for. Each time you shuffle there is a time delay that increases before you can shuffle again. Or you can pay to skip the time delay, but the price increases with each shuffle.

This simple gameplay addition adds a lot of strategy. You dont want to shuffle to late or two early.

How we built it

I built the app using flutter, and Firebase as the backend for live multiplayer games.

Challenges we ran into

Screen real estate is an issue on mobile phones and the game relies an a 5x5 grid of words. If users make their own tile packs, they words or sentences may not fit on the Bingo tile. To address this I added a swipable menu that shows the tiles in one row at a time. The letter at the top of the row is highlighted red so you can see row you are looking at below the grid.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Being a newer programmer, I have not played much with animations before. This being my first game I had to add some fun animation. I am proud of the fact when you start a game it looks like all your 25 tiles are being shuffled and you are waiting for it to stop to see your randomized Bingo card. It adds some excitement to the start of the game and highlights the randomness of your Bingo Card.

What we learned

This is my 3rd Flutter app (Not counting tutorials) and I seem to be building faster and faster each time. Here are a few other fun things I learned:

  • If you accidentally delete your app from firebase you can re-store it within 30 days... hopefully not making that mistake again.
  • I used a themes in flutter for the first time to make changing colors across the app much easier for myself while trying to nail the colors.
  • How to use Astro to build a quick and simple landing page hosted for free on cloud flair.
  • My San Diego Zoo season pass is much more fun, now that I can play Zoo Bingo

What's next for Vaygo Bingo

Lots of Starter Pack creations. Since I have an popular Outdoor blog I have some dedicated eyeballs I can advertise to for free. My plan is to make Vaygo Starter Packs for all the National Parks in the United States to help people explore the parks. This will hopefully get a good ramp up of users who will try Vaygo then want to use it for holiday parties and not just on the trail.

I have a lot more multiplayer refinements coming soon to add to the excitement. For example right now, you can see how many tiles in a row or total tiles they have gotten live in the game. I want to add a silhouette on their game board so you can see which tiles they have gotten.

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