Inspiration
We were going to make a restaurant web app until we realized at 3am on Saturday that Grub Hub is exactly what we'd be making. Around 5am, we decide on this idea.
How it works
FLANL = Free L.A.N. Logistics The idea behind the project is to streamline the LAN party hosting process. It provides a unified solution to chat, play music, and organize games. The lightweight server could be running on any computer in the LAN, whether it's a Raspberry Pi or someones gaming PC. Because we used Node.js, it'll run on most operating systems. When you initially navigate to the page, you enter your Steam ID into the form and it will automatically get you're Steam picture to display in the chat, as well as a list of all of your games to compile into the list of 'owned games'. From there, you'll be able to see a list of all the users that are logged in on the left. Switching to the 'stats' tab will show you the list of most popular games amongst the currently logged in users. This makes it easy to see which games you'll be able to play with other participants at the LAN. Switching to the 'Music" tab will show you the currently playing song and the next five queued songs. The idea behind this is that you can have a collaborative feed of music playing at the LAN. And since every user has the option of playing the music, a speaker setup isn't tied to the computer running the server. All it takes to add music to the playlist is a link from SoundCloud. Both songs and playlist can be added. And lastly, on the right side of the screen you'll find a real time chat of all the people logged in. As stated before, your Steam handle and picture are used as your login for the chat.
Challenges I ran into
Had to start a new project mid day Saturday.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
IT ACTUALLY WORKS!
What I learned
Learned some Angular, how to scrape web pages through Node, developed Git skills, and developed a a deeper JavaScript understanding. Also, it's a good idea to see if your idea has been done BEFORE the hackathon.
What's next for FLANL
We've made it easy to include other sources of music, so it'd be nice to get YouTube or Spotify included. Converting the chat to rich text would be another straightforward progression. We'd also like to add the ability to have a voting feature so that you can call a vote to play a certain game, order pizza, etc. Some more time for more optimized styling would always be good.
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