Mind Palace

With so much going on in the world today, it is hard to maintain balance within one’s personal life. Fear not! You can go to your “Mind Palace”, an adorable and relaxing place where your world is built and prospered by the only person in charge, YOU!

Inspiration

There are so many apps that track specific aspects of their users’ lives, but it is hard to keep track of them all, and many of these apps simply do not provide the help or incentive for the user to keep up their goals. Thus, we were inspired to create Mind Palace, an All-in-One life balance tracker in the form of an adorable world-building game. Through taking care of yourself, your world will prosper alongside you!

What it does

Mind Palace is a simple 2D world-building game in which the goal of the user/player is to maintain their world through maintaining their physical, mental, and emotional health. The game will fetch and receive data from built-in functions of the phone (i.e. calories burnt, steps taken, journal entries, etc.) and automatically update their corresponding in-game counterparts. Every day, the user can open the game and check the status and progress of their little world based on their actions and how well they have been taking care of themselves. Furthermore, by completing the in-game self-set challenges (i.e. 100 push ups in 1 day), the player can earn coins which can be used to customize their world. We hope that through taking care of the well-being and prosperity of the world, the users would be incentivized to keep up their good habits and take care of their physical, mental, and emotional health.

How we built it

At first, we spent hours finalizing our idea and design plan such as the goal and problems we attempted to solve. Then, we brainstormed our rough draft using paper sketches to model the different pages that we envisioned in our app. We then transitioned into building a simple interactive design demo through the online designing tool Figma in order to illustrate the general ideas, flow, and purpose of the game. Furthermore, prototyping was done on the Godot game engine.

Challenges we ran into

We quickly realized that the majority of our team were freshman hackers with very little to no knowledge of code, with it being the first hackathon for one our our team members. This inexperience coding outside the classroom proved to be challenging for bringing our dream into reality. After communicating with other teams, we attempted to learn other user interface tools such as React, but quickly became overwhelmed with all the new languages and syntax of such a powerful tool. To solve this problem, we ultimately decided it would be more productive to create a functional interactive slideshow that was easier for us to understand and design, than to spend hours stressing, cramming, and poorly designing a weak UI using React.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because we were on a very tight schedule, we wanted to ensure we created a product that could get our idea across as efficiently as possible. Our greatest accomplishment would be our communication and diligent work drive that solidified the creation of our prototype. Through collaboration, we were able to identify what problem we all were passionate about solving which led to our streamline work process. Each of us were delegated with a task and we are proud to say each one of us worked hard to make our vision come to life. Because we didn’t have the skills to necessarily code the app, we were worried about execution of our vision. However, Andrew and Victor quickly learned Figma in attempts to create this app prototype which led to the completion of our project. Iris additionally had to put her design skills to the test by considering user interfaces and aesthetics to create a design that would be utilizable to users.

What we learned

For the majority of our team, we attempted to create a functional and useful app/UI for Mind Palace using React and Godot game engine. Unfortunately, we quickly realized that none of us had extensive experience with Javascript, HTML, or any knowledge of React. Thus, we decided that the best course of action for the team and the user interface would be to prototype our app and implement an interactive design with the beginner-friendly tool Figma. Figma helped bring our vision of Mind Palace to life, allowing us to link pages of our app together while being simplistic and simple to learn. In the future, when we return to DubHacks, we hope to come back with a wider and more extensive base of skill sets that would enable us to better create, code, and implement an actual user interface using something such as React.

What's next for Mind Palace

We are set to bring this game to life after doing more research and learning how to use some of the advanced tools that we talked about above, and add more functionalities and “fun” to the game. In the end, all of us very much believe in the message of the app, and we would all personally use it in our day-to-day lives if it was built.