High-Level Requirements

Unified App Shell

• Designing a seamless experience that allows users to navigate between the main app and various sub-games with ease. This shell will be based on the PHT Lab’s other application, NetGauge, to ensure a consistent visual style between projects. We will be creating 3-5 specialized Twine games inspired by workshops conducted within the community, each focused on collecting a specific hypertension metric (such as dietary logs or blood pressure). These games will serve as examples, providing a blueprint for how future community-generated content can utilize storytelling as a form of medical data collection. This also includes extensive documentation and organization within our games to ensure non-technical users are able to produce their own Twine narratives.

Flutter Platform Accommodation

• To support platform integration, Flutter serves as the central application layer that connects Twine-based gameplay with backend health data systems. Through a custom communication bridge, user interactions within Twine modules—such as choices, inputs, or completed tasks—are captured and transmitted to the Playful Health Technology Lab’s Flutter framework. This ensures that gameplay actions are not isolated experiences, but instead directly contribute to structured health data collection, enabling real-time processing, storage, and feedback within the app. By using Flutter as this unifying layer, we maintain consistency across platforms while ensuring that culturally grounded gameplay remains tightly coupled with meaningful health tracking.

Firebase Storage

• CardioCare Quest requires a reliable and scalable system for storing health-related data generated through gameplay. User interactions within Twine modules—such as dietary inputs or blood pressure logs—must be captured, structured, and transmitted through the Flutter application to Firebase for secure storage. This system ensures that data is consistently synchronized across sessions and devices while remaining organized for efficient retrieval and future analysis. By leveraging Firebase’s real-time capabilities and its integration with Flutter via FlutterFire, the platform maintains a streamlined backend pipeline that supports accurate data collection without adding unnecessary development complexity.

High-Fidelity Game Design

• To sustain user engagement and trust, CardioCare Quest must deliver a responsive and high-performance gameplay experience across all supported devices. Interactions within Twine modules should produce immediate feedback, ensuring that user inputs like selections or data entries are reflected without noticeable delay. In addition to responsiveness, the application must support visually dynamic and culturally grounded designs, translated from a number of workshop game concepts without compromising performance. By utilizing Flutter’s different capabilities, the system can maintain consistent performance and fluid interactions, creating an experience that feels both polished and immersive while supporting the app’s health tracking objectives.

Technologies

Figma

This will be used as our primary UI/UX design tool. It will allow us to create high-fidelity interactive prototypes and designs for our app shell and Twine games we develop.

Flutter

This will be the tool used to design the surrounding app shell of CardioCare Quest. The platform for telemetry collection will be implemented within the Flutter shell and will be the primary point of communication between Twine and the collection pipeline.

Twine Sugarcube

Twine is an open source narrative tool that will allow users to create and import their own Twine projects into the CardioCare Quest application.

JavaScript

This language will be used for the process of data collection, building out hooks within the game, and to support the architecture for the Twine to Flutter integration bridge.

Firebase

Firebase serves as the backend infrastructure for CardioCare Quest, handling the storage and synchronization of user-generated health data. It enables real-time data updates and integrates seamlessly with Flutter through FlutterFire, ensuring reliable and scalable data management across the application.

GitHub

Our version control system. This ensures that our codebase is properly stored and accommodates all aspects of collaborative development throughout the project lifecycle.

Current Tech Demo

CardioCareQuestDemo Repository