quest

Inspiration

What if life were more like Solo Leveling, where every day presented thrilling new quests, but without the danger of having to fight monsters? Enter quest—a platform that brings a gamified spark to mundane daily routines and lets you climb the ranks with friends one quirky challenge at a time.

What is quest?

quest enhances your everyday routine with fun, unexpected missions. From finding the funkiest street art to discovering hidden landmarks in your city, quest pushes you to explore and create. Snap your achievements, get them verified, and stack up votes. It's a social network with a competitive twist!

Every morning, users are given 24 hours to complete a quest and submit a picture and/or location pin as proof. quest prompts are meant to be open-ended, allowing one’s creativity to shine through! Once you finish your daily quest, you can vote on your favorite quest submissions made by other users. As you complete quests in brave and creative ways, you’ll collect votes and climb the ranks. Users with the longest streaks of consecutive quests completed as well as the most total votes are displayed through in-app leaderboards.

How we built quest

We used Firebase’s developer tools to construct a robust and scalable backend and to secure user authentication processes. Utilizing Google Cloud's infrastructure, we ensured high availability and global scalability. The Cloud Firestore Database provided a responsive and flexible NoSQL database for storing and syncing data effortlessly across users. Firebase Cloud Functions allowed us to run serverless backend code in response to database triggers and authentication events, making the app highly responsive to user interactions. With Firebase Authentication, we implemented a seamless and secure user login system.

On the frontend side of things, React Native enabled us to build a cross-platform mobile application with a native look and feel, ensuring a smooth and consistent user experience on both iOS and Android devices.

Challenges and accomplishments

Originally, we envisioned quest with a cutting-edge twist: using machine learning to verify user submissions. The intent was to create an automated system that could accurately assess photo submissions, rewarding users for precision and authenticity. While this innovative feature is still in the pipeline, we're enthusiastic about its development and are dedicated to bringing it to fruition in future iterations of quest.

Another challenge we faced was incorporating the diverse features typical of a social media app. Crafting a user-friendly interface, integrating real-time interactions, and ensuring a seamless social connectivity required a deep dive into both front-end and back-end intricacies.

Despite these challenges, we're proud to have gained comprehensive knowledge in Firebase and React Native. Building a robust backend with real-time data sync as well as a cross-platform mobile application as a minimum viable product was no easy task, but we felt we did a great job given the time constraint.

Moreover, we're proud to have created an engaging concept that captures the spirit of adventure in everyday life. We hope to keep working on quest and give people the thrill of “leveling up” in real life.

What's next for quest

We hope to immediately start testing quest with our friends back home and continuing to pack in features—think ML verifications, streak bonuses, team-based quests, and an experience system. There’s also lots of work to be done to strengthen the app’s backbone—smarter authentication, swift vote counts, smart caching, and neater code. Get ready for a leveled-up quest!