Pics With Friends

Pics with Friends was an iOS application developed for the Photo Hack Day 3 2012 and won the First Prize.

The PhotoHack Day 3 was held on July 14 and 15, 2012 at the DropBox HQ. I team up with Sean and Art for the event. The theme of the hackathon was to create an application that was centered around photos, and we created pics with friends.

Pics with Friends is a mobile guessing game that lets a user take a picture, and ask a friend to guess what it is. The picture has various filters applied to it, making the guess harder. The images below is the typical workflow.

Game Concept:
This is the welcome screen, where a user is asked to connect using Facebook. Facebook auth is required since you invite your facebook friends to play with you. Nothing is posted on the wall without approval. After authentication, you see the list of active games, or can start a new game with a friend.

If it is your turn in the game, you are required to select a picture. This can be a picture using the camera, or something from the album. Once a picture is taken, you can give it a caption, the single word that your friend is required to guess.

This picture is sent to your friend, and they now need to guess the caption you gave it.To spice up things a little bit, the picture has a set of filters applied to it; these filters make it hard to recognize the picture.

Users can peel filters, one at a time, but will lose points everytime they peel out a filter. Once the caption is guessed, the friend can challange you back.

 

The game itself is simple, but the fun starts when you are outdoors and start clicking pictures and ask their friends to guess. The filters make it fun, since they transform a familiar place to something you could not recognize.

APIs Used:
Since it was a hackathon, we could use some really cool APIs.

• We used FlashFoto APIs to store out images, and do some initial processing like cropping and rotation
• Aviary filters were used to apply the bizzare filter effects. 
• The beautiful sample images were from 500px. 
• Facebook Open Graph for friends, and optionally post those pics and guesses to your FB timeline. 

Press

• https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2012/07/25/photo-hack-day-winner/
• http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/07/18/san-francisco-showed-photo-hack-day-love-as-300-developers-churned-out-70-hacks-in-24-hours/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23kffX82imM
• http://allfacebook.com/photo-hack-day-3-pics-with-friends_b95141
• http://youthenter.blog.com/2012/07/25/facebook-photo-hack-day-winner/

Its been a while since we worked on it, but we have plans to continue working on it. Would love you hear your suggestions, etc. Do you think you would play this game ?