TL Party

Landing site
Main Page
Detailed Event Info Modal
Host an Event Modal
Profile Page

Inspiration

Last Saturday, we were up at 5 AM. Why? Well, we weren’t diligently working on our hackathon project, but we were instead getting ready to watch the League of Legends world finals. A few hours prior, we had even restocked our snack supply-- and now we were ready to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

As we munched on our Doritos (as all gamers™ do) while watching the LCK and LPL teams duke it out, we had a collective revelation: wouldn’t it be cool if we could find other people near us who were doing the same thing? Nothing beats watching esports games with other fans. We soon found out via social media that many of our own friends were also awake for these games.

Although the esports community is worldwide, our own interactions with each other are limited (mostly to text on a page). We have Twitch, Reddit, and Discord-- but we have no centralized platform for in-person watch parties. There are many fans out there who don’t get to see each other beyond the aforementioned platforms. That’s why we built TL Party.

It’s a way to bring the esports community closer together.

What it does

TL Party is a platform which lets you find covid-safe, in-person esports watch parties near you. You can sign up to attend other watch parties that have already been organized by other users, or you can decide to host your own!

Once you sign up, you’ll get to see the central hub for activity on our website: you very own Events Near You page. On this page, you’ll see all the watch parties that other users have organized for upcoming esports events. If you’re only interested in certain games (i.e. League or Valorant), you can filter the events near you so you only see watch parties for those games. Alternatively, if you’re only interested in in-person watch parties for a specific event (i.e. the Worlds Finals), you can also filter by event.

Once you find an event you love, go ahead and enter what snack you’ll be bringing, and click that Register button!

Or maybe you’d prefer to host your own event. No worries— simply click the “I want to host” button and fill out all the relevant event details :)

Of course we wouldn’t bring the community together if we didn’t have a Profile Page, so head on over there to check out all the upcoming events you’ve registered for and the past events you’ve already attended.

How we built it

The frontend uses React and Bootstrap while the backend relies on Django and Postgres. We also have Auth0 integration for logging in, and the key feature on the main page (users filtering upcoming parties based on events) relies on data from the LiquipediaDB API.

Challenges we ran into

For most of our team, this was the very first website we had ever built, so we had to learn React, Django, postgreSQL, Auth0, Heroku deployment, and pretty much every single thing in the tech stack we used over the past week. Besides just learning how to use the tools, we ran into a few other issues:

CORS interfering with API calls
API concurrency issues with async and promises
Heroku deployment
Linking Django with React

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This platform is something that can genuinely be used to bring the esports community-- starting with the TL fanbase-- together. We’re proud of the idea itself, but more so the execution and teamwork we displayed over the past week.