Calpal

Inspiration

Due to the addictive nature of cheap foods (or food in general), many people find themselves living an unhealthy lifestyle because of the way they have to fulfill their fundamental needs. Maintaining a good diet, or even simply limiting your calories, can be a challenging task for many, including myself. I figured I'd try to find a way to motivate myself, and help others motivate themselves, to eat less.

What it does

The app works on an honor system with yourself. You receive a certain daily amount of calories and have to share it with a virtual animal. Both of you must eat so to keep the animal from starving, you are forced to limit yourself on your own calories. If you eat a certain amount of calories, you enter it into the app (honor system) and it will subtract it from the daily supply. You can spend the remaining calories (if any), to feel your animal. The app relies that if you no longer have calories left in game, you will not eat in real life.

How we built it

Using the pygame library in python. The graphics were made by Konrad, and the code and creature AI was developed together by Aleksey (me) and Sazzad.

Challenges we ran into

Developing the AI to simulate a living creature is a fair challenge (I'm writing while we are still in development). Another difficulty is creating a skeletal animation system for the animal to have a wide range of movement capabilities defined by code (If it becomes too time consuming, we might not be able to finish the skeletal animation)