Gator Grievances

We listen, and we judge.

Inspiration

As some legal drama enthusiasts, we were initially very enthusiastic about increasing women's presence and knowledge in court proceedings. Family legal matters are difficult times to navigate, especially for underprivileged women who have less access to lawyers. Our Gator Grievances web game strives to enhance users' understanding of divorce and child custody laws as they specifically apply in the courtroom in a simplified process. The goal is not only to educate but to empower women with the confidence and knowledge needed to navigate the legal system effectively. By participating in these interactive simulations in a retro game-ified way, we hope to demystify the courtroom experience and provide a valuable resource for women seeking to take legal action with greater assurance and understanding.

What it does

In the Gator Grievances web game, the user takes the perspective of the plaintiff and navigates a simplified yet realistic court proceeding. The judge character will prompt the user to make decisions by displaying commonly asked questions in divorce and custody cases that reflect actual legal practices and principles. For instance, the judge may ask the plaintiff to provide specific types of evidence. It is then up to the user to identify and present the correct evidence, determining whether the judge will accept it and, ultimately, whether the plaintiff wins the case. Through this interactive process, we aim to prepare users by familiarizing them with the types of questions and evidence they might encounter in a real court setting, thereby equipping them with the knowledge and confidence needed to present their case effectively.

How we built it

This project was created with a combination of hand drawn artistry and diverse frontend development. Mia and Aadithi used digital software to draw the sprites and settings of our game world, with an adorable and pixelated twist. They also worked on animating these sprites with other digital tools like PixilArt and integrating their movements into our web application screens. Angela and Claire kickstarted the design of the frontend interface by organizing and building the functional foundations of our many application screens. For this, we used ReactJS and Tailwind/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

During the ideation phase of our project, we spent a lot of time trying to make it a appealing product idea that can solve a prominent real world problem. We wanted to make this project as interactive as possible given how convoluted the legal process already can be to many.

From a technical standpoint, frontend development using React and Tailwind/CSS was a first for some of us. Understanding how to read and write with JSX syntax was a constant learning curve as well as learning about the many UI components that React supports.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

With the varying levels in experience among the members in our team, we are very proud that we were able to maintain a supportive and overall mutually inspiring environment with each other. We often bounced design ideas off of each other and helped each other debug/explain certain parts of the application we were familiar with. We are also very proud of our UI as we spent a lot of time making as user-friendly and visually appealing as possible, both through hand-drawn aspects and code.

What we learned

By working on this project together, each member of our team felt that we gained significant experience in working with these frontend frameworks. Throughout the development process, there was a lot of research, debugging, and collaboration involved that helped us familiarize with using these frameworks in a more detailed level. While we might have only simply scratched the surface of everything that encompasses frontend development, we definitely have an enhanced understanding of certain aspects because of working on this project together. On a different note, we have also learned a lot more about the nuances in laws relating to divorce and custody cases. We went down a hole of many legal aspects such as the division of assets, residency requirements, spousal support, etc. which can differ widely based on individual circumstances. This further highlighted the need for this education and importance of a platform like this.

What's next for Gator Grievances

There's so much we can see in store for Gator Grievances! Of course, there are many other kinds of court cases out there that are equally important to be represented and learned about, including family law, probate, juvenile law, contract disputes, just to name a few. We hope we can expand the types of cases that we educate our users about so they can walk into legal processes with more confidence. There are also many nuances between the laws of every state in the US. We would like to be able to address these differences for more states in our game in the future. From a game standpoint, there are many more functionalities that can be valuable to develop. We would like to increase the complexity of the game by involving the other members you'd typically see in a court (i.e. prosecutor, defendant, witnesses) in the conversation portion of our game. Additionally, we would like to polish some UI/UX elements, as the projects short timeframe did not allow us to create or utilize the assets we wanted. Although optional, we also believe that including background music and sound effects would add to the overall quality and experience.