Appsassins - Databases Project Fall 2015

During the Fall 2015 semester, I worked as a back end (database side) developer on a team of 3 back end developers and 4 front end developers to create a web app and a companion Android mobile app. Our project, named Appsassins, created a 21st century way to create, manage, and play games of assassins with your friends. ​
Assassins is played by many different people around the world, most notably students at high school and college campuses. Managing game play (keeping track of who has tagged whom and re-assigning targets) using traditional methods of pen and paper or excel is a logistical nightmare, and that is why we created Appsassins as the digital solution to this problem. Appsassins streamlines the process of creating, playing, and tracking games of assassins. 
Assassins is a variant of tag in which every player is initially assigned another player as their target. Your mission is to 'assassinate' your target. After you eliminate your first target, you get assigned your target's target. The game continues until there is only one player left. 
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Features

Game Creation

Invite your friends to join your game using their email's. Appsassins keeps track of how many of your invites have RSVP'd to join your game, and notifies you when everyone has responded. 

Auto-Generate Targets

Once the game roster is finalized, Appsassins automatically assigns each player a target. Each player is only able to see who their current target is, keeping the identity of who is targeting them a secret. 
Once a player tags their target, the player is automatically assigned a new target right away to keep game play flowing smoothly. 

Track Games

Appsassins allows all players to stay up to date on whats happening in the game with a constantly updated 'active players' list and a live map of all the tags in the game. ​

Technical Description

As one of the three back end developers, I worked to design an efficient mySQL database for our site that minimized data redundancies and to write REST API's that allowed our front end team to access and edit the data stored in the database. 

Languages Used

  • PHP - writing the API's, connecting to the front end via JSON, executing mySQL queries
    • Slim - PHP framework that facilitated using JSON
  • mySQL - querying and creating the database
  • LAMP Stack - development environment used on the servers for this project
    • Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php