Game Genres
Adding genres to games for easier discovery
Imagine this
Have you seen a game with a cool title and cover art but had no idea what the game is about? Or maybe you had an idea but realized while playing it that your initial impression was way off? To address this, I introduced game genres to our catalog!
Skillz game Diamond Strike, classified as a Puzzle game
How did I implement game genres?
Indeed, I say “I” here, because it is an example where I implemented the entire feature end-to-end, and I'm pretty proud of that fact!* This project involved creating tables, performing table migrations, creating new UIs, and exposing and consuming endpoints. Really, it puts the “full” in “full stack”. Here are the steps I took:
- Create a new table
- Populate that table with the genre list
- Create a dropdown menu for developers to select which genres their games fall under
- Create another table to link the genres to the games
- Expose an endpoint that took the genre(s) and added it to the game data
- Consume this endpoint to fetch genre data for games
- Use the above data to add the genre to a game's page via a small text field
- Create a new page which categorized games by genre
To implement this new feature, I integrated applications using two different frameworks: Ruby on Rails and Next.js, which required me to learn Ruby and Rails. While this process was challenging, it was quite the learning opportunity!
Once this feature was deployed, users no longer visited the website not knowing what kind of experience a particular game would provide. In fact, this feature change led to a 15% increase in game downloads.
*Note: I absolutely consulted with designers, project managers, and fellow engineers for their approvals throughout this process. I did not go rogue, however fun that may have been.
Other Projects
Cloud Gaming
Enabling gameplay on any web-connected device
Personal Website
Showcasing my skills by building a website from scratch
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