Game Hut

Our team of of three, enthusiastic, junior developers spent less than three weeks putting together Game Hut once we identified there was an opportunity in our work environment for us to socialize more with our colleagues. We heard about the Hackathon event and thought it would be a fun opportunity for us to not only try to achieve something that we could share with our other colleagues, but to exercise our minds and work on code that we've never tried before.

Like most other companies that had recently switched to full-time remote staffing our team of developers, project managers, business analysts, and architects quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to socialize like we used to in the past. No more happy hours, water-cooler gossip, walking over to a colleague's desk to assist with some paired-programming, or even a high-five before leaving for the day. The inspiration for Game Hut comes from that void of social interaction and aims to connect you and your teammates in ways where traditional team building activities fail. Finally, with Game Hut we can enjoy these working relationships no matter where we're currently working from.

Let's talk about some technologies! Right now Game Hut is a proof of concept to demonstrate that there could be many, many additional mini-games added to the app. Currently, our functional mini-game "Trivial Trivia Time" takes advantage of Appian 21.1 and an online API for extracting trivia questions used in the game to limit data entry tasks and populate a database quickly and efficiently given our shortened schedule.

Obviously, Appian's integration objects made the trivia API possible and cut down the amount of work we'd have to do significantly, However, there were many components and objects that also enabled us to reach this point. Our trivia mini-game, in its proof-of-concept form for Game Hut relies heavily of Appian's interface objects, smarts services to write to data stores, and local refresh variables to restore an updated, accurate game state for players.

We had our fair-share of challenges when putting this application together. We wanted to test Appian's abilities to allow multiple users to operate on multiple screens within the same interface. Furthermore, we hoped to push the boundaries of our understanding and become more affiliated with the features that Appian has to offer. Navigating through type coercion when bringing our CDTs into the front-end to be edited proved to be a more frequent exception than we originally could have anticipated. A major hurdle we needed to overcome to allow users to both display the live game state as well as make changes to it simultaneously had us take full advantage of local refresh variables and the write to data store entity smart service. Allowing data to be displayed and edited dynamically with a free range of user interaction meant we had to take full advantage of a database-backed design implemented on the front-end without the use of records or custom plugins.

By challenging ourselves to work without the record-centric paradigm that we're so used to, nor the process model heavy actions that we've previously relied on, we achieved our ultimate goal of exposing ourselves to more of Appian's features. Although the Hackathon deadline is approaching, Game Hut has proven to be enjoyable so much that it warrants self-motivated, continued development for our own benefit. We're looking forward to demoing this application to our project managers and other colleagues at our next "virtual" happy hour.