Video
Inspiration
Everyone has experienced that awkward moment with a new group of people. You sit down, look at each other for a couple seconds, and realise you have nothing to do. Introducing IceBreaker, a new quiz-game app that allows for easy breaking of social boundries.
What it does
IceBreaker allows a group of friends to connect to a lobby and play through a quiz-game together. It asks questions and requires each user to input an answer that will not only entertain, but also provide some insight in to who that person is. It will then require each user to guess who submitted what answer, allowing for some interesting guessing and character judging. Scores will be tallied each round and a winner will be crowned at the end!
How I built it
This app has been built using React for the front end and Express JS for the backend. The backend is created using an API style methodology, while the front end is single page with dynamically updating content. Both are hosted on separate AWS EC2 instances and allow for access over the internet.
Challenges I ran into
As first time users of many of these technologies, this was a very steep learning curve. Lots of issues with out of scope state assignments meant that doing backend calls in the frontend caused a lot of headache and a general inexperience when building backends meant that there were some infrastructural issues that had to be fixed last minute.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We managed to develop a full-stack web application hosted on a server!
What I learned
It is crucial to always define the structure of a program before going ahead and programming it. It can quickly get out of control and with multiple people working together, having a solid outline is always good to be able to look back to. We have also all learnt and become more familiar with the technologies that we used, namely Express JS, React, and AWS.
What's next for IceBreaker
We are hoping to clean up the front end UI design to make a more attractive app, include some proper questions designed to help people get to know each other, and also allow for better multiplayer functionality such as creating and joining room and rooms of different sizes (currently there is only one room supported with max capacity of 3)
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