## Inspiration

After seeing the breakout success that was Pokemon Go, my partner and I were motivated to create our own game that was heavily tied to physical locations in the real-world.

## What it does

Our game is supported on every device that has a modern web browser, absolutely no installation required. You walk around the real world, fighting your way through procedurally generated dungeons that are tied to physical locations. If you find that a dungeon is too hard, you can pair up with some friends and tackle it together.

Unlike Niantic, who monetized Pokemon Go using micro-transactions, we plan to monetize the game by allowing local businesses to to bid on enhancements to their location in the game-world. For example, a local coffee shop could offer an in-game bonus to players who purchase a coffee at their location.

By offloading the cost of the game onto businesses instead of players we hope to create a less "stressful" game, meaning players will spend more time having fun and less time worrying about when they'll need to cough up more money to keep playing.

## How We built it

The stack for our game is built entirely around the Node.js ecosystem: express, socket.io, gulp, webpack, and more. For easy horizontal scaling, we make use of Heroku to manage and run our servers. Computationally intensive one-off tasks (such as image resizing) are offloaded onto AWS Lambda to help keep server costs down.

To improve the speed at which our website and game assets load all static files are routed through MaxCDN, a continent delivery network with over 19 datacenters around the world. For security, all requests to any of our servers are routed through CloudFlare, a service which helps to keep websites safe using traffic filtering and other techniques.

Finally, our public facing website makes use of Mithril MVC, an incredibly fast and light one-page-app framework. Using Mithril allows us to keep our website incredibly responsive and performant.
## Inspiration

Our inspiration was to provide a robust and user-friendly financial platform. After hours of brainstorming, we decided to create a decentralized mutual fund on mobile devices. We also wanted to explore new technologies whilst creating a product that has several use cases of social impact. Our team used React Native and Smart Contracts along with Celo's SDK to discover BlockChain and the conglomerate use cases associated with these technologies. This includes group insurance, financial literacy, personal investment.

## What it does

Allows users in shared communities to pool their funds and use our platform to easily invest in different stock and companies for which they are passionate about with a decreased/shared risk.

## How we built it

* Smart Contract for the transfer of funds on the blockchain made using Solidity
* A robust backend and authentication system made using node.js, express.js, and MongoDB.
* Elegant front end made with react-native and Celo's SDK.

## Challenges we ran into

Unfamiliar with the tech stack used to create this project and the BlockChain technology.

## What we learned

We learned the many new languages and frameworks used. This includes building cross-platform mobile apps on react-native, the underlying principles of BlockChain technology such as smart contracts, and decentralized apps.

## What's next for *PoolNVest*

Expanding our API to select low-risk stocks and allows the community to vote upon where to invest the funds.
Refine and improve the proof of concept into a marketable MVP and tailor the UI towards the specific use cases as mentioned above.
## ❗Inspiration❗

Its a struggle to stay **connected** with your friends, often times keeping touch through social media and messaging isn't enough. One thing that has helped our team be connected is video games, so for our project we thought to adapt a favorite childhood game of ours into an easily accessible web application where you can meet and play with new friends!

## ❓What are the Rules❓

Apart from the most important rule of all (have fun), the game has a couple of other rules you need to learn if you want to play:

      **1.** Each player will answer after each other, the answer must start with the last letter of the previous answer.

      **2.** Each player's answer has to be a valid word (no "asnflasnfalk" or "asdaafsa")

      **2.** Each player only has 10 seconds to answer, so make sure to be quick!

Once you have read the rules, you can create a lobby or have your friends invite you to one!

## 🖊️ Technical Overview 🖊️

The frontend is built using **React** and **Bootstrap**, we serve this over a **Node.js** backend and through the use of **Socket.io** in order to communicate with everything. Images and icons are hosted on **Firebase** as we hope in the future to allow users to upload there own photos!

## ⛰️Challenges we Faced⛰️

A lot of work and effort was put into connecting the frontend and backend, React and Node.js + Socket.io aren't the easiest to couple together. For example:

How can we keep track of the user when every time they go to a new page, the clients socket.id would change. (booo)

Once we receive the data from the backend, how can we render it efficiently on the front end. (lame)

How can we keep track of the same timer across a ton of different clients (yikes)

The good news as that while these challenges took a while, we definitely became better programs by solving them and hopefully wont have to suffer as much next time.

## 🏆 Accomplishments 🏆

We made a game that we are proud of, and is super fun!