Out And About: A Walking History of Queer Signaling

Inspiration

We spent most of the time during the Hackathon conceptualizing our projection and finding an inspiration for it. In the end, we focused on something relevant to our community as a whole because we really want a project that was intentional and addressed a knowledge gap that many people had. To that end, we looked into queer history, specifically parts that most people were not aware of but were still interesting, and built off of that. To that end, we decided to talk about queer signaling.

What it does

Our app is a prototype for a game which serves as a walk through the forest where the player character meets various characters referring figures, both historical and present. Each figure will educate the player character on some signaling used within their era and within their community. Then, at the end, the player character arrives in a city where queer culture is very accepted, but there is still a call to action to continue to improve what our predecessors had built upon.

How we built it

We initially intended to create the app using Unity, as a 2d side-scroller. However, due to time constraints and lack of experience with Unity, we decided to settle on a mock-up instead. So, we created an app demo of what it could look like in Figma.

Challenges we ran into

One of the largest challenges we faced was trying to be intentional through our actions and our code. We had a lot of ideas, but we didn't have the time to implement all the ideas we had, so we had to scale down greatly and choose a few instances to focus on while still making sure that a diverse subset of the queer community was covered. In addition, since it was the first Hackathon for many members of our team, we were unused to the process and how it was supposed to proceed. So, we were a little confused about some parts of the program, but we ultimately had a good time together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

My group is extremely proud of the concept that we came up with. We feel that it is very thoughtful and intentional, and it occupies a niche that has yet to be filled. Yet, even though it may be obscure, it is still important information for queer people to know. After all, all that we have achieved so far relies on the achievements of the predecessors before us. We were also proud of how we put ourselves out there and chose to present even with a product that had its own flaws and didn't perfectly meet the idea that we had envisioned.

What we learned

From a logistical standpoint, a lot of us learned how much work a Hackathon could be, as well as how much fun it is. From a technical standpoint, the workshops were extremely helpful. We really enjoyed learning about creative coding with Alberto Mancia and portfolio building with Katie Brown. For the project, we did a lot of research about queer culture and learned a lot about that as well. From a coding standpoint, we learned new ways to use Figma to try to best represent our project for the demo. For example, we figured out how to implement horizontal scrolling for our 2d side-scroller mock-up.

What's next for Out And About: A Walking History of Queer Signaling

Since we submitted a mock-up, the next steps would be to actually flesh it out on a Unity engine. In addition, there were many queer signals that we were not able to include in the project that we would love to add in future iterations. Based on how many signals we can find, we also want to make the travel routes that the character in the app takes more personalized, so that they can explore signals specific to a certain community.

Built With

• figma