Inspiration
Our inspiration for this was tamagotchi (egg-friend), a virtual pet toy that you have to take care of mixed with the gaminification of the ability to learn skills consistently.
What it does
Everytime you slack off, it loses health and memory of who you are. It gives the user a purpose to remember to do their tasks for the pet or it won't remember you.
It's a complete terminal app, it can run on any device that possesses a terminal or a console window. It looks for your git logs and decides if you have been productive or not. Tracking your progress, better it is the happier and healthier it gets.
Animated ASCII art that conveys different emotions of the pet to the user.
A clean and easy to use UI, only needing less than 5 keys to operate.
How we built it
DevGotchi was developed fully in python, using uv as a package manager. subprocess library let's the program check your git status in the background without interrupting your interaction with your pet.
Animations are text files with multiple frames being displayed onto the terminal.
Challenges we ran into
Lack of equipment - In order to draw the art for the pet, we lacked stylus so we made one up using a normal pen and a chocolate wrapper.
Cross-platform compatibility - Initially developed using the UNIX system, we realized windows system won't be able to run the program properly, specially the animations, but that was quickly resolved by adding libraries like msvcrt to enable windows compatibility.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The clean UI
Making the process of learning coding or using terminal a bit more fun
The fun and engaging experience that motivates the user to keep going or to play with the pet
What we learned
The fear of losing something even a virtual pet can motivate people. People are more willing to improve themselves for others than themselves.
We learns how to create ASCII animations using python and to display them in terminal.
We learnt how different UNIX and Windows system terminals really are.
What's next for DevGotchi
We plan to add more sprites and more types of pets in the future.
We are looking for a way for it to become available for more skills and not just coding.
A proper cross-device integration (specially mobile) so people can take care of their pet even when they are on a break from their PC.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.