Space Apps Challenge 2017

Try the game on your mobile device visiting this link!

Intro

Social game based on challenges. All challenges are defined by Inupiaqs words used to name a wide variety of sea ice terms. A challenge consists of taking a picture of the term provided along with its definition. Using crowdsourcing the same players completing challenges can as well verify other's players challenges by reviewing their pictures and marking them as good/bad/unknown.

Challenges are renewed every week, packed in seasons. Every season has a few challenges which any player can complete.

Based on player's evaluations, any player's challenge gets a score. A leaderboard is created adding up a player's challenges scores and ordering them. So the player who gets more ok evaluations in more challenges will get more points and be on top of the board. This board is cleared every time a season finishes and starts a new one.

Technical

Our solution is a webb-app so we can reach a wider range of public despite of the device's operating system. It consumes a REST API to gather all the challenges and players info but also has offline capabilities caching server requests using service-workers.

It has a simple login to link a player's game to a user. It is built with Angular 2 + Bootstrap 4.

It can be installed to the homescreen following PWA guidelines.

Server side follows a REST architecture built on top of Node that persists data to a MySQL database.

Workflow

All our code is hosted in Github which served us as the starting point for setting up continous integration.

We connected our back-end repo to Heroku and got instant deploy of the API here: https://spaceapp2017.herokuapp.com

Our front-end project is connected to Travis that compiles the project and deploys it automagically to firebase.

Code

View source code:

• Back-end (nodejs)
• Front-end (angular 2)

To-do's

We learnt a lot but there were also many features we wanted to implement and had to be discarded because of the limited time:

• Social login and sharing with Facebook, twitter, instagram.
• Less dependency on connection (i.e. store media locally and upload it later)
• Collect more data in a challenge such as location info using device GPS
• Increment the challenges complexity by connecting our API with NCDC's Climate Data Online API and help the players avoiding possible dangers by encouraging them not to play in certain areas.
• Using more mobile features like notifications.
• Implementing a list of hidden challenges which a player can unlock at any time (these wouldn't change over time, e.g. "You have taken 100 pictures" or "You won two seasons" ).
• Implementing a user level or pet system in which the user can improve his/her avatar ( gamificate the app even more)
• ... and many more.