Do you think you can recognize a clout chaser? Do you think you’re in touch with pop culture? Play Clout Compare to test your knowledge of pop culture, including fan-favorite celebrities and brands! Challenge your friends and compete for the Clout Crown! Coming soon: Friends and family capability <3

Built for Zothacks 2021

Our team was inspired by the Higher and Lower Game and wanted to create a newly functional game that tests and explores a common situation among the youth of being very addicted to their favorite celebrities and pop culture. After discussing various trends occurring between the 2016-2021 years, we decided to create our own game using Instagram’s 50 most popular celebrities.

The Instagram Clout Compare game displays two Instagram profiles of either celebrities or brands. The user chooses the profile they think has more Instagram followers. If the user is correct, their score goes up by one and another pair of Instagram profiles are displayed. The game keeps going until the user guesses wrong, and the game over screen is displayed.

For the front-end development, we used HTML and CSS to style and build the UI of the program. Clout Compare was additionally built on Flask and Jinja templates which were used to complete the back end of the project. In addition, we also implemented the Google Images API to fetch images which allowed us to store and use the data that we would incorporate into our program. With great help from our mentor Shuvam and awesome teamwork collaboration as well as attending the amazing workshops hosted at the hackathon, we were successfully able to complete our project!

We ran into many hurdles while developing Cloud Compare. At first, we did not have a clear idea of what we wanted to create due to our relative inexperience. Getting an Instagram profile’s follower count proved to be quite difficult as the API we used to access it ran into a problem of too many log-in requests. Additionally, connecting the front end to the back end was difficult, as many problems regarding the format arose as the time was running out.

We are proud that we created an aesthetically pleasing game that works properly with such little time. Although we had many errors throughout the course of our game, we are pleased with the end product that none of us imagined we could make.

As we all know, this is a beginner hackathon and as beginners, we were not exposed to many concepts used in our programs initially, but as time went on, we started to understand and grasp concepts that we would never think we could do! We learned how HTML and CSS can be used to design very aesthetically pleasing user interfaces, how to create multiple HTML files that could be accessed from one another, and how to style in CSS. Furthermore, we also learned how Flask and Jinja templates could allow us to connect front end to back end, and how to obtain data of all sorts from web APIs. Additionally, we also learn how important team communication is when it comes to creating projects with others and learned a very valuable lesson that teamwork makes the dream work.

If we had more time to work on this game, we could have gotten the exact number of followers for the Instagram profiles and created animations for guessing correctly, guessing incorrectly, and going to the next pair of Instagram profiles. We would also like to implement a game mode that is playable with friends’ Instagram profiles.