LetsGame

A board game group event scheduling app. Made to help busy people find more time to play board games.

The idea was inspired by noticing how much time my friends and I would spend deciding on which games to play instead of actually playing them.

Scope of Project

I undertook this project as part of my learning ASP.NET and web app development. For this reason covering some of the most fundemental elements was my true goal and I learned more from this single project than I ever could have from simply reading the docs.

Areas I wanted to cover:

• Entity Framework
  • SQL Server
  • Fluid API
• ASP.NET Core + Razor Pages
  • Partial views
  • Layout pages
  • Routing
  • Dependency Injection
    • CRUD Event Manager Class
    • CRUD Friend Manager Class
  • Site Areas
  • REST API: This is not fully implemented yet. Original intention was for data to be accesible for an associated Discord bot.
  • Allow Interaction with BGG API: https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/BGG_XML_API2. Users can manage collections of games they have or want to play.
  • Bussiness Logic
    • Create Database Schema
    • Create Object Models for Entity Framework.
    • User Notification System: One of the first things I'd add.
    • Create Events, View Event, Modify Event if event creator
    • Event Roles: Creator can assign trusted permissions to some participants. Would like to add this feature.
    • Invite to Events accept invites/join Events
    • Create, Vote on Polls
    • Notify event participants of updates regarding events.
    • Allow user to change user profile picture and other app specific details.
    • Allow selection of an image for the event
    • Send/Recieve/Accept friend requests. Invite friends to events you are part of.
    • User chat. Not something originally considered to be within the scope of the project. As the project developed it became clear chat would be necessary.

I even learned a few things I didn't set out to:

• AJAX
• JQuery
• DOM manipulation

Things I did not intend to accomplish.

• UI Focus. In my learning timeline I has just finsihed a pure HTML/CSS project and wanted to concentrate more on developing my backend understanding. The site is rendered using the boostrap css library.

State of the project

The project is currently unfinished. I implemented all of the "core" functionality. However, some big areas such as user chat and user notifications remain un-implemented.

In addition, much of the code is in need of a refactor. My lack of knowledge at the time means that the database queries are not properly optimised.

Updating the UI would be a huge must. I might consider a clientside framework to create the UI.

Implementing the ability to fecth games from BGG (Board game geek has a public API) would make the polls feel more important.

Logic that calculates which games can be played during the event duration would help guide the selection choices of the group.

Conclusion

I hope/plan to return to this project in the future but for now I learned a lot and that was my main goal.