-
-
Home Page
-
Login Page
Inspiration
Until April of 2022, Pokémon Go was nothing but an entertaining story where people tripped on stairs for being too engrossed in their phones. This quickly changed as it made its resurgence in our dorm, and my initial curiosity quickly blossomed into total obsession, reaching 64 hours within my first week of playing. With everyone playing together, we were able to take on any raid without hesitation, and the convenience allowed us to run out across campus any time to catch rare Pokémon. However, as schedules got busier and we ceased to live two steps down a hallway, we were no longer able to play with the same intensity. I could only jump into raids alone and hope that someone else would appear. I later was invited into the UCI Pokémon Go discord, and I refound that sense of community and the excitement that came with it. Traveling in a pack of 100+ during raid day and sweeping through gyms was one of the highlights of college. Not everyone is as fortunate to live in a college community or be invited into these communities, and soon, I will graduate and finding people to play with will become much more difficult. Pokémon Go encourages its users to explore outside as well as fosters a supportive community, and I would like to make it more accessible for everyone interested to play. This website will allow us to continue to find that sense of community no matter where we are.
What it does
The purpose of this website is to coordinate meetups for Pokémon Go players. Pokémon Go is a game played by those of all ages from some as young as 4 to those nearing 100, so to ensure safety, there are no chat options within the game. Many other software also focus more on game optimization than the local community, so there is no method for locals to coordinate meetups apart from group chats. By making a location based website, players can easily hop on whenever they want and however much is convenient for them and simply drop a time, location, and purpose, making meeting coordination much smoother. In order to ensure safety, a review system is also implemented, keeping players accountable for their interactions with the community.
How we built it
The app was built with a React frontend with a Python FastAPI backend. The map and markers used were all from Leaflet. For our database system, we used DynamoDB where we store our data. We have 4 tables storing account/user information, event information, interested events for each user, and reviews. Each event is represented by a unique post_id general by uuid, while each user is represented by their username.
Challenges we ran into
We faced many challenges with state management as there were a lot of variables used across multiple components. We had to use React’s useContext to set a global state for the components that need it. In addition, we ran into a lot of dependency issues as our independent work used different packages that we had to figure out how to install. Event filtering was also a daunting task as we used a complex filter system to show certain markers.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The biggest accomplishment we had was that we could break this project into smaller more manageable, and as a result, we were able to make progress very quickly and efficiently. In addition, before doing this project one of us was more experienced in frontend while the other was more experienced in backend. However, during the hackathon, we swapped roles where we were working on tasks we were weaker in. Despite this, we made good progress and became more well-rounded, especially since we were a team of two and still managed to create a working project along with attending the hackathon’s social events.
What we learned
Both of us initially were not planning on doing a project for LAHacks. However, after coming up with an idea that both of us were excited to make and become users of, we learned how to balance the thrill of creating a project while still being able to have fun and enjoy the events that the organizers have hosted for us. Not only did we learn a significant amount by taking tasks on areas we were weaker on, we also strengthened our time management skills and our ability to break down a large project into smaller doable tasks.
What's next for Pokémon Go Touch Grass
This hackathon provided a great opportunity for us to create a proof of concept, but there are still many things that can be implemented. One of the biggest things would be to implement this website as a mobile app as well since an app would be much more convenient for players walking about. It would also be nice if the app could have some more feature expansions to include things like flares for rare or good IV Pokémon, which would encourage even more collaboration within the community. Also, while unrestricted chats would be a safety hazard, there is definitely a good middle ground allowing people to send encouraging or logistical messages.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.