Manoa the Gathering

During my Fall semester of 2016, I took the ICS 314: Software Engineering course at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. For the class’ final project, we had to work in a group to develop a web application unique to UH Manoa and only accessible to those with a UH account using the JavaScript web application framework, Meteor. In order to handle the design, we used the UI framework Semantic UI. Within our group of four, we had to apply the software engineering process during every step of building out our app, using Git and GitHub, as well as GitHub’s project management and milestones.

Our project was an free, online way of playing the most popular trading card game, Magic: The Gathering, as it is normally very expensive to play and test out competitive decks which can run up to thousands of dollars. We didn’t want it to just be a simple clone of Magic, however, so we added some creative liberty to it with a UH Manoa-specific twist. The cards were replaced with special artifacts, buildings, and the history of UH. Each card still had the same functionality, just with a different name, image, and flavor text. Our app, Manoa: The Gathering, also had a chat room, various pages, and some cool easter eggs, all detailed in the Guided Tour of our app’s home page.

My contribution to the project was mostly technical. I dealt with the Galaxy deployment, Meteor Sessions for the battle pages, and various other functionalities including the direct messaging, UH CAS authentication login/logout, and a randomized player being selected to go first, which displayed as a system message. I personally had very little contribution to the layout and design of the project, as I focused more on researching and programming functionalities necessary to the app’s liveness and ability to do what was expected of it, but I still did some work on the design with Semantic UI.

This was the first web application and front-end work I’ve ever done. Thus, I’ve learned a lot from this project. My JavaScript capabilities have increased, as well as my knowledge on the server client interactions model, databases, and the overall process of building web apps. I’ve also learned a lot about web design as I haven’t done much with creating my own websites prior to this. However, in the future, I hope to work with more relevant frameworks, as Meteor and Semantic UI don’t seem to be used often in the field.

If you want to see the source code or learn more about Manoa: The Gathering, check out our GitHub Organization Page.