Bobbification: The Process of Enhancing Focus with Gamified Fun

The Project

Bobbification is a project that serves as a milder "game" alternative to more predatory, addictive ones. This app mitigates the difficulty of withdrawal and motivates its users to focus. The reason I created this project was due to the countless students, including myself, that are constantly glued to their cell phones and tablets. As a result, I designed a solution that was tailored to feedback and designed with acclaimed techniques to help such students. I believe the hardest parts of my project were learning to use and setup Flutter and Firestore, in addition to setting up the coloring feature. Flutter in particular is notorious for being a challenge to install onto an IDE, and the language, while conveniently, followed an app-building structure considered unconventional to me at the time. Learning to utilize Firestore effectively was also a struggle: specifically, efficient management of database reads and writes required creative solutions such as debouncing. Furthermore, cloud functions were immensely difficult to set up and write, since it uses TypeScript, an entirely different language that does not have in-built file formatting. Coloring, however, posed the most significant challenge. While Flutter has in-built methods like modulation that can color a pre-colored layer, it tends to remove any sort of depth and reduces it to a solid color. This forced me to learn a bit of color theory, specifically about color matrixes, and a specific template (Luminosity) that preserves color depth is being used today. Image pre-processing was similar; normalization on GIMP tends to reduce the depth of a colored layer into a single dimension, forcing me to manually set values to be consistent with one another for the color system to work properly. The reason pre-processing is necessary is because the color matrix I employed only shifts one color to another, therefore applying the same values on a red color would entail a different outcome than on a blue color. This forces me to pre-process all garment layers into a consistent color to predictability set layer colors.

View this project on YouTube