Pen & Party

Group Finder App

Pen & Party is a group finder app specifically made for pen & paper and board games.

Create a profile and group or search for others, using a wide variety of filters, relevant for pen & paper players. Use a Tinder-like swipe function to browse through groups and ask for invites. Set up meetings with the in-built calendar to easily find dates.

This project was created for the Mobile App Development course at Uni Bremen, by N. Autzen and D. Ruh, in collaboration with Lisa Hesselbarth, Rachel Ringe and Dominik Sauer.

Functions
Technologies
Design

Functionality

  • Create a profile with preferences
  • Search for groups
  • Use relevant filters
  • Swipe to find your group
  • Create dates for your group
  • Dice Simulator

With the task of designing an app with online functionality for a special target group, we as a group quickly agreed on the target group of pen & paper players. The problem of finding a group is familiar to most of us, especially when it comes to specific games or preferences. Therefore, we wanted to develop an app that addresses this issue.

Users can create a profile and set their preferences for games, play style and no-go’s as well as contact information. Those preferences can be applied as filter to a group search list. Many group settings can be considered in the filtering to find the perfect group.

For browsing, we feature Tinder-like cards, that lists an image and information about the group. Groups can then accept or decline request they receive, but also invite people actively.

Meetings can be set up within a group using the integrated calendar, where each user can then set his availability for the date.

Technologies

With the exception of smaller apps, Pen&Party was the first genuine project with Flutter. However, Flutter proved to be beginner–friendly and allowed me to create and design pages in no time. We also worked with external packages and more advanced features like stream–based lists.

Through Firebase we were able to realise our online functions and manage user authentication. Dominik and Rachel did the majority of the work in this area, but we all became more familiar with the handling and functions of Firebase, as well as the implementation of the interface.

Design

The design of the app was especially Lisa‘s area of work, but we all got involved and came up with ideas to develop a nice and user–friendly interface.

For me, it was especially the group search and the corresponding filter options. The maps for your own groups and the group search, and the animations for the matching mode.

The proximity of functionality and design within the code appealed to me personally and made the work easier.