premDAT

Platform for comparing "player-characters" (PCs) of role-playing games, which served as a use case for Colvis. It is therefore closely related to my research, and was used at the end of 2020 to validate Colvis' interface components. For the participants, the interest of premDAT is to archive, present, then compare their characters, sometimes several decades old. These comparisons allow them to hypothesize about the evolution of the "rolist" tropes, as well as to compare the players' trends according to demographic data (gender, age, location). Technically, the platform is composed of a Vue.js + Nuxt.js + Vuetify frontend, supported by D3 for the main visualization, and a Strapi backend (a "headless CMS" in Node.js).

premDAT and the experience it has hosted are currently being evaluated, and will be the subject of an academic publication as well as an important part of my thesis.

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Lessons learned:

I'm the only contributor on this project, whether it's the appearance, the server and all aspects of development. Technically, my greatest lesson was to learn humility, both in terms of features and in terms of blind confidence in NPM modules. Strapi proved to be pleasant to use, but the calamitous management of the updates of the project led to two rewrites of backend (end of 2019, then September 2020). The numerous features have been implemented quickly, to the detriment of code quality. At the end of the project, the "debt" generated by the absence of non-regression tests has considerably hampered my productivity, since most of the updates resulted in serious bugs.