Wanderer's Chronicle

Journey tab in white color scheme
Status tab in green color scheme
Items tab in amber color scheme
Settings tab in white color scheme
Login screen in classic color scheme

Inspiration

Our project pays homage to Zork, a text-based game built by MIT students in the 1980s.

What it does

Like Zork, our app is text-based and tracks your steps, pace, and decisions to progress your journey. No two journeys are the same; using generative AI, each journey you take is unique and distinguishable. We know that deciding to lead a healthier life is a daunting and hard decision to make. So the goal of TWC is to make that decision easier and more intuitive by gamifying it. You can make 4 decisions every 2 hours, which serve as checkpoints. This is to promote real-world activity and health/wellness. There are 5 tabs in the app: journal, map, items, status, and settings. Journal is where it all takes place; you make decisions and see your outcome there. Map shows your current location and places you have and have not explored. To discover the whole map, you must walk. Items serves as your inventory, which tracks what you collect throughout your journey. Status tracks how many steps you've taken as well as whether you are standing still, walking slowly, or walking fast, and various other things like achievements, items carried, etc. Settings is where you can change the app's color scheme to one of the four we created: classic, amber, green, and white. It is also where you can reset your progress or sign out.

How we built it

We built this app entirely in Swift and SwiftUI using XCode. For health tracking, we used Apple's HealthKit and Core Motion Pedometer. Whichever step tracker was higher is what would be displayed to users. We also used Firebase Auth and Firestore DB to track users when they make a new account and sign in. For the journey prompts, we used Google Gemini's API. To help give us direction, we used Claude and GitHub CoPilot to assist us in our process.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled to properly implement the Apple HealthKit; our app often crashed. We also struggled to decide how we would build this app, but eventually got there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of having a final product that is good enough to be presented to others, and consider this Hackathon a very valuable experience.

What we learned

We gained experience building a project from scratch and using various API's like Google Gemini. We learned how to use Firebase and Firestore to keep track of users and user authentication. We also learned the value of teamwork as this was a monumental group effort.