The goal of this app was to combine things that one would normally do when browsing for video games to purchase. That is look at things like prices, videos of gameplay, and reviews. I wanted all of these things under one cohesive app to make purchasing in the future easier for the average consumer.
View the struggleThe goal was to combine major places of traffic when making purchase decisions such as YouTube, Metacritic, and Amazon into the app to avoid fatigue of browsing different places for an answer. By doing this one would be able to make a purchase decision within a few minutes rather than hours after research.
View the ProcessI looked into what people would care about most when it comes to deciding factors for purchasing a game. These were heavily leaned towards three main objects, and those were: Price, Gameplay, and Reviews.
The original plan was of course to gain access to the API first then create the app around the data that I would receive. I also planned out how the data would be shown on different layers to ensure that there was not any overcrowding.
The design was quite simple to begin, and that was by having a shelf like layout where the games would be held in order for the user to see them quickly. With this layout it would imitate a library one has in normal platforms.
Testing throughout the process was a bit weird especially when it came to memory based changes such as arrays, and that was because it caused the entire IDE to shutdown making for interesting debugs. Otherwise the code was continously running throughout the coding process.
One of the biggest challenges was figuring out how to bring together information from different sources, such as game prices, gameplay videos, and reviews. With the advent of AI it has become nearly impossible to get data for free.
Although I have been programming for a while Swift is still new to me. The overall design of Swift is C-based, but there are a lot of modifiers that are specific to iOS development that proved challenging.
I was able to obtain data eventually but I needed to use that little bit of data that I could get to achieve as much as I wanted to do with the overall app. Balancing what I have with what I want was a huge challenge since the app could've been so much more if I could get my hands on more data, but I had to make due with what I had.
This project has taught me that although something can see so simple in concept it's another thing to actually go through and code it. Especially with AI being so used now it's not simple to get access to data like API without going through many challenges or being denied outright. It would be better to plan with what I can get versus what I think is possible.
Plan with what you can get, and not what you would like to achieve.
AI has made it extremely hard to get data that was once easy to access.
Each iteration taught me that you have be willing to change direction at a moment's notice
I would like to continue to refine the idea and one day find a version of this app that is not so tedious to release. The app itself includes a lot of features that are not sustainable if released to the public such as the data being obtained through the SteamAPI which is an unofficial source and could be broken at any moment.
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