SFU Scavenger Hunt

🔗 Links

💡 My Inspiration

As a 3rd year student at SFU, I wanted to create something that would help bring our campus community together. I've always thought that orientation and campus exploration could be way more fun and engaging, so I came up with the idea of a scavenger hunt app! The goal was to make it easy for students to discover cool spots around campus while competing with friends in real-time. Whether you're new to SFU or have been here for years, there's always something new to find, and I wanted to gamify that experience.

🛠️ Tech Stack

✨ Key Features

Core Gameplay

• Create and join real-time scavenger hunts with location-based tasks
• Support for different task types: photo submissions, QR codes, text answers, and geolocation check-ins
• Team up with friends and track your progress together in real-time
• Interactive map showing where teams are, task locations, and where people have submitted
• Host controls to create games, manage tasks, and approve/reject submissions

Social Features

• Add friends by username and see their profiles
• Customize your profile with a picture and display name
• Chat with your team during games to coordinate
• Live leaderboard to see who's winning

Game Management

• Browse available games and filter by status
• Create custom hunts with multiple tasks and set start/end times
• Lobby system where players can join teams before the game starts
• View your game history and search through past games
• Automatic tracking of which games you've participated in

🎯 Technical Challenges

• Learning Firebase from scratch - this was my first time working with Firebase and its real-time database features
• Connecting different accounts with each other through membership
• Updates from the firebase
• Performance issues

📚 What I Learned

This is my of my biggest Android projects, so I got more comfortable using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. The MVVM architecture pattern was also new to me, especially making components lifecycle-aware. This was also my first time working with Firebase, and I learned about querying Firestore databases, and how it was easy to connect to the Firebase database.