Snaploop

Like a treasure hunt, but with friends and snaps!

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Inspiration

The inspiration for Snaploop came during a hackaton. We came to Imperial Hack 2017 with a plan to make a bot that deals with travel plans, but after spending 6 hours on it, it felt quite boring and we brainstormed some ideas.

We wanted something fun, interesting, using Messenger and some cool APIs like image recognition, so Snaploop was born. (we didn't know the name until 2 a.m. though)

What it does

Snaploop is very simple: just send a message to bot, and it randomly selects one of the players that are playing the game to take a photo. The photo gets analysed by our awesome 3rd party AI services, and shows some tags. If user is happy with those tags, they are sent to all other players, which have to snap something that matches the tags.

The first user who gets the picture close enough gets to set the new challenge, and it repeats. Infinitely. Looping. Infinite snaps. Snaploop. You get the idea.

How we built it

It was built using the Microsoft bot framework which provides an awesome way to handle actual interaction between the actual bot code and Facebook Messenger platform. node.js was used for all of the code, with image recognition provided by ClarifAI.

Challenges we ran into

Main challenge was fine tuning the gameplay flow so it keep being fun, without getting players frustrated. Other than that, there were no significant issues.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

It is fun, works without any additional apps as 2 billion people already use Messenger, its quite snappy (pun intended) and has a viral potential. It was funny looking at my teammates running around at 2a.m. looking for fire extinguisher. ( lit)

What we learned

We learned that there is such this as too much pizza, that SQL Server is very hard to set up, and that a cool and minimum viable product can be built in a very small team in less than a day. Also, sleep is overrated.

What's next for Snaploop

IPO

Honorable mentions

Domino's, those guys behind us, Justin Bieber, yoga activity, and inflatable sleeping pillows

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