COMP5022 Innovative Product Development - Individual Project Proposal

The idea of the project [14 marks]

The Board Game Suggester aims to suggest a selection of games that appeals to the user and their group. The project will take into account the desired number of players (or unrestricted) and return a number of games that it believes the user will enjoy. The user can integrate BoardGameGeek to track their game catalogue, and add friends to see games owned by their friends in their search results. The project will also make a note of which games are available to play on Board Game Arena (with a note about games which require a premium subscription) and Steam.

So far, no other app¹ allows filtering recommendations based on number of players, or games owned by the user or their friends.

Any board game enthusiast could make use of the project, and many family friends would be likely to use the project once it is complete.

The benefits for the users and stakeholders are:

• Quick recommendations based on a specified category or game
• Recommendations will make a note on the availability of the game to the user:
  • The user owns the game
  • The user's friends own the game
  • The game can be played on Board Game Arena, for free
  • The game can be played on Board Game Arena, but requires a player to have a premium membership
  • The game can be played on Steam
• Recommendations will take into account the desired number of players (or unrestricted search)

¹: That I could find, anyway

Background research that will influence the product development [5 marks]

In my research, I found the following alternatives:

• Quantic Foundry's recommender
• Recommend Games (currently non-functional)
• Try These Games
• Board Game Finder
• Board Game Tips

None of these projects appear to allow filtering by number of players, nor to they integrate with any sort of game catalogue to allow display of owned games or friends' games; my project will. Most such sites use rating data from BoardGameGeek to calculate game similarity; it is a large free data set, so this is a sensible choice which my project will use as well.

Technologies to be used in the product development [7 marks]

• Hardware:
  • Database/processing server
  • User web-compatible devices
• Software:
  • Web technologies. Not yet confirmed, current top candidates:
    • Sycamore/Perseus (Rust - WebAssembly)
    • Yew/No SSR (Front-end: Rust - WebAssembly) + Rocket (Back-end: Rust)
    • Solid/No SSR (Front-end: TypeScript) + Rocket (Back-end: Rust)
    • React/Next (TypeScript)
  • Database (PostgreSQL)
• Infrastructure:
  • Sycamore/Perseus stack:
    • perseus to build and serve the application
    • cargo to manage dependencies
  • Yew/No SSR stack:
    • cargo to build the application to a static bundle and manage dependencies
    • Rocket application to serve the application and its API routes
  • Solid/No SSR stack:
    • npm to manage dependencies
    • babel to compile the application code
    • webpack to bundle the compiled application code
    • Rocket application to serve the application and its API routes
  • React/Next stack:
    • npm to manage dependencies
    • babel to transpile the application code
    • webpack to bundle the transpiled application code
    • next to serve the application and its API routes
• Revenue model:
  • FOSS with an optional donation link or subscription service for prioritised support.

Project team requirements [4 marks]

The team to deliver a solution is me, Albany, Aiko, Ben, and Jacob. If I were putting together a team to work on my project, I would find people who were either comfortable with Rust or willing to learn it, or had prior experience with React or Solid (and choose that stack). Those less comfortable with the stack would be given the simpler/easier tasks to grow their confidence. Also useful for team members is soft skills for improving UI design, and large scale communication to assist in marketing.