Team PlaypalspresentPlaypal
Playpal Demo Video
Review Connect Play
Playpal was developed to address the need to connect gamers with one another. With community building at its core, we created the application to prompt users to interact with each other and form player groups. The app allows users to message each other and create calendar events based on common interests. Playpal is also a gaming web application allowing users to explore game titles and leave reviews. The latter is how the app fosters community building by matching users who leave the same rating for a game title. This gives the user the ability to be friends and thus build a gaming relationship.
The Team
Daniel Mohammadian
Matthew Mathieson
Sam Woodall
Daniel Wong
Emory Brock
Technologies
We used: Firebase, Javascript, Svelte, Svelte Kit, TalkJS, Svelte Calendar, Axios, Node JS, Rawg.Io
Firebase - to try a non relational database and provide features we thought we could utilise, Javascript - as it is very good working with svete, Svelte - relatively new framework that is rising in popularity based on the state of js website, also has a reputation of being relatively quick to accomadate to, we also wanted to try something different. TalkJS - to allow us to implement a messaging system within the time scale. Axios - ease of use with parsing data, we wanted some familiarity with fetching data.
Challenges Faced
Github version control - first time working in a group with more than 2 people and figuring out how to create application features while minimising the number of merging conflicts.
Non-relational database implementation - we learned to use PostgreSQL in the bootcamp and initially approached Firebase in a similar manner. We quickly learned that this is not the intended utilisation of the tech and had to change our implementation of it.
Svelte - Having a React background from the bootcamp, we had to re-train ourselves to utilise the strengths of Svelte. We had to adjust our application's file structure, the utilisation of Svelte stores and how to trigger page/component re-renders.
User authentication - While Firebase has this capability we decided not to incorporate it into our application as it is email-based - a feature our application does not use. Consequently, we encountered issues in maintaining and accessing a user info store across our application.
Documentation - we encountered the value of having well written documentation that allowed us to incorporate features quickly with a solid understanding of how it works.
For more information go to https://github.com/matthew-1313/PlayPal-FrontEnd/, the read me will contain more information about how playpal works.