viewUs

Inspiration

We all had a first time getting into watching eSports, but are often left looking for more of our favorite player or team when we first started watching. To help anyone who feels like this, we created viewUs.

What it does

viewUs lets users easily access vods from teams, players, and past tournaments through a simple search function

How I built it

Using the LiquipediaDB-API and the user's input, we search for any matches in the past year containing the team, player, or tournament the user is looking for. If any of those matches have a vod recorded on the wiki, we display a random one to the user, enabling them to continue to binge watch some high octane eSports.

Challenges I ran into

Querying the API gave us a lot of trouble, as there was no function to match substrings. This unfortunately meant we were not able to add the autocomplete function for user input that we had originally envisioned. Along with this, the limit of 5000 results and the long length of query times meant that is was unreasonable to search through as many results as we would have liked. In the end we decided to query only 500 results in the past year, so that the user wouldn't have to wait too long to get a response.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Adding a mimic-autocomplete function was a tough task, but gives a nice sense of smoothness and quality. Along with this, being able to go from a team page or player page to finding a vod of them was a very challenging task as there is no data points in teams or players information which would lead us to any vods.

What I learned

How to query an API for data, and how to set up a proxy server.

What's next for viewUs

Adding more support for cases where vods can't be found by substituting the vod link with another link to the player or team, or searching in times other than the past year. Also adding optional additional search fields to allow users to find vods for a certain player when they were on a certain team, or for a certain team in a given tournament.