SideQuest

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  When you enter the app, you will be met by a starting screen before your mission is activated.

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  You've started your mission! You have 2 minutes to complete it.

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  Here is me taking a photo of my reading corner.

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  After you take your photo, you will have the opportunity to submit the mission.

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  Through your feed, you can see the missions that your friends completed!

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  You can choose to vote on what you think someone's mission was in the feed.

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  Oops! I guessed the person's mission wrong, so unfortunately I didn't get extra XP points.

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  You can keep track of your total XP points in your personal dashboard.

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  You can advance levels based on the amount of XP points you have!

Inspiration

Social media promised to connect us, but somewhere along the way, it trapped us in endless scrolling cycles. As someone deeply interested in product management and human behavior, I watched my peers struggle with social media addiction- not because they lacked willpower, but because these platforms were designed to keep us glued to screens rather than living our lives.

SideQuest was born from a simple question: What if social media encouraged you to put your phone DOWN instead of staring at it?

I wanted to reverse-engineer the addictive mechanics of social media (the dopamine hits, the FOMO, the gamification) and redirect them toward something meaningful: real-world experiences and genuine human connection. The result is an app that makes adventure a social activity and transforms everyday moments into shared victories.

What it does

SideQuest is the anti-doomscroll. Think BeReal meets Pokémon GO meets your favorite RPG leveling system.

Here's how it works:

The Mission Drop

At a random time each day, you receive a secret mission notification You have 2 minutes to "activate" the mission before it expires Missions range from "Capture a sunrise" to "High-five a stranger" to "Find street art"

Photo Verification

Submit photo proof of completing your mission Our Vision AI verifies your submission using keyword matching and confidence scoring Successful missions award XP; failures teach you to try again

The Social Layer

Your friends see your mission photos (but not the mission itself) They can guess what YOUR mission was and earn bonus XP for correct guesses Climb the leaderboard together as you level up through real-world adventures

** Gamification That Matters**

Earn XP for completing missions and guessing friends' missions correctly Level up and unlock new mission categories Build streaks and compete on leaderboards But here's the twist: you can't progress by scrolling- only by DOING!

How we built it

I walked into TreeHacks with zero coding experience and a dream.

Tech Stack: -SwiftUI for the entire frontend interface -Vision Framework (Apple's ML) for image classification and mission verification -UserDefaults for persistent XP and level tracking -Claude AI as a vibe-coding agent & debugger

Architecture Highlights:

-ImageVerifier.swift: Custom ML pipeline that: uses Apple's VNClassifyImageRequest to analyze photos, implements a sophisticated scoring engine with required/supporting/disqualifying keywords, handles edge cases like shadows, abstract concepts, and ambiguous objects, returns confidence scores rather than binary pass/fail

-Mission System: Dynamic mission generation with: category-based mission pools (Photo, Social, Creative, Food, Fitness), randomized timing to create urgency and FOMO, difficulty-based XP rewards

-XP Manager: Persistent gamification engine, auto-saves progress to device, calculates level-up thresholds exponentially, tracks total XP, current level, and progress to next level

Design Philosophy: I spent significant time crafting a "hypebeast" aesthetic (bold colors (neon green accent), clean typography, high contrast black backgrounds) because I knew my target audience (Gen Z) would only engage if the app felt exciting. The UI needed to match the energy of the experience.

Vibe-Coding:Since I couldn't write code, I became an expert at something else: prompt engineering and product thinking. I learned to: articulate problems clearly to AI, debug by understanding error messages and asking the right questions, iterate rapidly on features based on testing, and think in systems rather than just features

Challenges we ran into

I came to TreeHacks with a team, but we quickly realized our visions weren't aligned. Instead of compromising, I made the scary decision to go solo at my first hackathon, with no coding background. That first moment of staring at an empty Xcode project was genuinely terrifying.

Getting image verification to work reliably was HARD. Early versions had a tendency to misclassify images (for instance, crashing on edge cases like shadows or reflections or accepting a photo of anything as a coffee cup). I iterated through 15+ versions of the scoring algorithm, adjusting confidence thresholds (too high = nothing passes, too low = everything passes), keyword dictionaries (balancing specificity vs. flexibility), supporting vs. disqualifying keywords, and fallback cases for ambiguous missions. The final product isn't nearly close to perfect, but it is significantly better than where I started.

Lastly, this being my first hackathon meant that I came in with zero coding experience. Even though I had Claude to help me out, I still spent majority of my time at TreeHacks poring over bugs and trying to understand the foreign language of error messages. However, I am grateful for the experience because it taught me both technical skills like understanding stack traces and thinking about edge cases, but also the concept of resilience and how hard engineers work to ship the amazing products we know and love today.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am so, so happy that I stuck through this whole hackathon. Despite the team mix-up and the huge learning curve, I am so proud of myself for shipping this final product. I felt like I as able to prove to myself that hackathons are not just for engineers but also for individuals who simply care about product-facing thinking and user empathy.

What we learned

Technical:

• Basics of Swift UI (thank you hack pack) -Computer vision and ML confidence scoring -Prompt engineering tactics/working with LLMs

Product: -User experience design for Gen Z -Gamification mechanics that drive behavior change -How to quickly scope an MVP

*Personal: -Empathy -Always have a backup plan -RESILIENCE.

What's next for SideQuest

I definitely want to continue this project beyond the hackathon! Here are my ideas on improving:

1. Fix Vision AI Accuracy
2. Add real social features (adding friends, likes/comments, etc)
3. Measuring impact (does this truly improve mental health? if not, what can i do to improve the app)
4. Creating community: all my friends will be downloading this and they can't say no >:)

Built With

• claude
• swift