Dodo Trading Pals

Inspiration

As an animal crossing player, we tend to find duplicate items. We use the beachside to hoard them. Instead of selling the items at Nook’s, how about trading them with other players? While there are ways to arrange trades with other players through social media, but you find them shortly after they close their airport. Our project is animal crossing based only to help players find what they want and what they have to trade.

What it does

Our application allows Animal Crossing players to connect with others in order to exchange houseware objects from the game. Users create an account on our website and fill in information concerning objects that they currently own and wish to trade. They can then consult other user's trade offers or post their own!

How we built it

We created our website using the Django web framework. We based the overall structure of our app on a blog tutorial created by CoreyMSchafer on Youtube. We modified it to contain the Animal Crossing houseware objects by calling the ACNH API. For the front-end, we brainstormed using Figma. We implemented the front-end using Bootstrap, HTML, and CSS.

Challenges we ran into

There is a large variety of objects in the Animal Crossing universe. We originally wanted to include different categories to include fish, critters, recipes, etc but ended up just sticking to houseware items for now as it was complicated to organize this amount of data.

We had trouble with Git; we had git merge errors and were unable to pull from the remote repo due to modified pycache files. To resolve our issue, we created a .gitignore file that allowed us to merge our changes with less conflict.

Lastly, we had issues with running the webserver but were able to resolve it using advice from StackOverflow.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our first project using Django. Since it was our first time using the framework, it required us to read documentation and watch tutorials. For most of us, this was also our first hackathon.

What we learned

We learned how to use the Django framework for the web app. We also learned how to make virtual environments. Lastly, we learned about Git/Github for effective collaboration.

What's next for Dodo Trading Pals

The plan is to have users get matched with each other based on what item they are looking for and filters for the posts based on what the trader has. Also adding extra objects such as fish and recipes and critters etc..