Worky Talky

Want to interact?
Virtual office space
Let's talk!

Inspiration

Looking through the numbers and reports from remote workers, we can see that one of the most disruptive problems to tackle is loneliness. It can affect motivation and productivity and even cause mental health issues as it is really hard to feel connected to co-workers at a distance. Having this in mind, we wanted to develop a fun tool, that would serve to encourage people to connect on a daily basis and bring interactions that happen all the time in the office into the virtual world.

What it does

WorkyTalky is a realtime gamified virtual office environment, where people are represented by characters. Co-workers can interact with each other by sitting for a lunch together in the cafeteria, having a coffee on the balcony, chatting in the meeting room or just bumping into each other in the hallway. The virtual office is designed as a game, so players have fun using it and moving around. By doing so, whenever in the proximity of another player or interactable object, they are prompted to connect to other user(s) through an interactive video chat, supporting plenty of activities. The chat is automatically generated, which makes reaching out to others quick and simple. Those who want to have lunch together can then meet up in the cafeteria, or work together at a desk, or even have a workout after office hours are over. Our app makes hanging out in the office fun and easy, by which we help and encourage co-workers to do more activities together.

How I built it

We used React, Node.js, Socket.io for data transmission and Heroku where we deployed our solution.

Challenges I ran into

Too many ideas and too little time! :) We managed to implement the basic functionality, but unfortunately ran out of time to add some features for a neat user interface, like personalized characters for users, more office colors, the calendar widget, etc.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The app is actually running live and functioning properly :D We managed to implement the basic functionality, but unfortunately ran out of time to add some features for a neat user interface, like personalized characters for users, more office colors, the calendar widget, etc. Therefore, we currently integrated our solution with Zoom, while we'd like to create our won add-ons for the video chatting in the long term.

What I learned

As this was the first React 2D web game we ever created, there was a lot to learn about making our game engine. We are both also beginners at Node.js backend development and Socket.io, so that also took some tutorials to get it running.

What's next for Worky Talky

Uh, where to begin! We would love to enhance the game aspect of the app and add new activities, but we are also thinking about creating something like this to support personal relationships, especially friendships, as we are best friends living on two different sides of Europe.