Get a Life | Tristan Volk

PlatformBrowser

Started ProductionJune 2017

Duration3 weeks

Tools UsedGIT, Notepad++

RolesWeb Developer, UI/UX Designer

Information

I apologise for the name, you're perfectly fine with the life you have. The name 'Get a Life' is a quick way to bring the message across. You click a button which generates a baby that is born in a country somewhere on Earth in 2015. Considering other names could have been 'Baby Maker', 'Baby Creator', or 'Baby Generator' I am happy with the name I chose.

Back to the project. On this site, you can generate a new life by clicking the big green button which will then pick a random number between two numbers. The lowest number being 1 and the highest being ((country birth rate/1000)*country population) for each country combined. In other words, the expected amount of babies to be born in each country for 2015 combined. By generating a random number between these two values the site determines what country your baby is from.

It is also possible to name your newly generated baby. While on the site, you can also see a list of the latest babies as well as your personal list.

Try it out for yourself at https://tristanvolk.com/getalife/

Origin Story

I started thinking about how many people were alive and where I would most likely be born had I been born today. Then the thought struck me, wouldn't it be interesting to turn this into a site? With the click of a button you would give birth to a baby boy/girl and see where it was born.

After having the idea for a little while, I finally found the time to work on it. I first did research, trying to find real world statistics of the population and birth rate of each country. As it turns out, this information is publicly available! I used the data from 2015, which were the latest available numbers at the time.

Cool, now we know the birth rate. What now? As the birth rate is per 1,000 people, we can use the population count to get an indication on how many babies are expected to be born that year in a given country. There's several approaches to this, for example ((birth rate/1000)*population). After doing that I had to dive into SQL, which I had not much prior experience with. The end result may be a bit silly, but the learning experience and fun I had while working on it was well worth the effort.

During development, the ideas of being able to trade babies or having a working infant mortality rate were things I considered. I did not end up implementing these, as I did not feel like soliciting in human trafficking or being responsible for the death of virtual infants. You can find past versions of this project here.

About me

I am a Dutch and British X-year-old living in the Netherlands. My passion for creating games started out by customising existing games on servers to make them more enjoyable, growing and leading a small community along the way. Other self-taught hobbies of mine are web development and video editing. I later studied International Game Architecture & Design at (NHTV) Breda University of Applied Sciences. I enjoy making things!