The Decision Tree

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  Thumbnail of our app

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  An example of a unique tree

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  Personality summary page at the end of a quiz

Inspiration

Our project is inspired by BuzzFeed quizzes and MBTI personality assessments. The underlying structure of how these quizzes are constructed is as you might have guessed, decision trees. So we took that idea and make it into a game where we are growing a tree based on our own decisions, measured through our answers to each prompts.

What it does

Instead of having you wait until the end to get your result, you can see how the tree grows right as you start answering the questions. These answers will then correspond to our value scores that affects the properties of the tree as it grows. By the end, you will see your fully grown tree, with its own accompanying environment that is unique to yourself (or at least 1 out of 14.3 million).

How we built it

While the coding of the app is important, most of our work ends up in planning the questions and values. Because it would be hard to start from the scratch without structured data to go along with it. We first drafted the questions and their answer choices in a document. Then thought of three value pairs that are on a line-spectrum to represent 6 different affinities. By processing the score in these three value pairs, we arrive at 9 different personalities that identify each player.

Challenges we ran into

While initially we thought of using hand drawn sprites for the game, the time constraint was an obstacle we could not overcome. With that we have to rely on the help of LLMs to generate us a mathematical algorithm that generates the roots and leaves of the tree.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Getting everything submitted on time might be the best accomplishment for us. For having to create a project in under 24 hours while also commuting to and from campus, it's very rewarding to have a semi-finished product to present to the judge panel.

What we learned

We learned that having multiple questions and answer choices can create extremely high number of game states. At the start, we only have a few possibilities. But then as the quiz gets built, more possibilities are created. Then by the end of development, we have to narrow it back down to a select few to properly get to a conclusion for the game.

What's next for The Decision Tree

In the future, we would like to make a version that's also mobile friendly. Since this app was run solely on vanilla java with phaser, it has limited capabilities on being responsive to different screen sizes. If we were given infinite time, we would like to add hand drawn sprites to create a more friendly aesthetic that feels hand-crafted.

Built With

• github
• javascript
• phaser.js
• vercel
• vite