Spotify Party Quiz Game

Inspiration

Our inspiration for this game came from various mobile-based party games available, along with other quiz games such as Kahoot. As each of our team members are passionate about music, and due to a lack of any similar games available, we were inspired to create a music-based party game which helps you to learn your friends' music tastes and have everyone's guilty music pleasures laid out on the table for everyone to see. This is done via Spotify's API, which accesses data about each user's account as they play the game.

What it does

This 4-player game has players connect their Spotify accounts to the application, and will then aggregate everyone's data to create a series of customised multiple-choice quiz questions. Some examples of questions include "Recently, who has been most likely to listen to The Beatles?", or "What is Adam's favourite song at the moment?"

How we built it

The game was built using PHP with a HTML/CSS frontend with JavaScript. A MySQL database was used which stores game data, including the various game lobbies, players, artists and tracks. We used Spotify's API to gather user data, including their top listened tracks, albums and artists.

Challenges Faced

Due to limitations with Spotify's API being in "developer mode" until approval is given, users cannot authenticate with the API unless their account email is in a list of pre-approved users.
Server and database configuration was challenging as security measures limited connection to one user at a time.
Client synchronisation issues resulting in users being given different questions and the scoreboard being out of sync.

Features that we're proud of

The user interface is of a very high quality, responsible, professional looking and functions well on all devices.
Additional Spotify API usage to gather data such as album covers and music embed links to create a more fully-fledged experience.
Implementation of "lobbies", so multiple games are able to occur simultaneously, each with their own users and questions. Users can join any lobby with a game code available from the lobby creator.

Future of the Game

If we are able to get approval from Spotify to deploy this game in a wider environment, we may consider doing so.
Include more questions and better question logic - originally, we had the idea to implement "rounds", where multiple trivia questions based on a single Track, Artist, Genre or Album are asked in a row.
Improve the player flexibility - due to styling limitations, we are only limited to 4 answers (and hence players) per question, so being able to scale this would enable a range of 3-8 players to play.
Port the webapp to iOS and Android, as this will enable a wider use of Spotify's SDK to play music automatically, round-by-round.

Note

Due to temporary limitations with our Spotify API connection, a member of our team must first approve all emails of any participants, so for this reason, the game will not run without prior arrangement.