Trueque Gamer

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This is a project that a friend and I came up with when I found out how tedious it is to exchange games through Facebook groups (because I recently bought my first console — a PS4 — in a long time), so I figured out why not create a web page? so I asked him for help designing it. Thus all the design is his and all the code is mine.

(Just to give some context to the non-spanish speakers, trueque means exchange, so the name is pretty obvious.)

Technologies used:

  • React.js
  • Django
  • Flux
  • JS
  • npm
  • gulp
  • webpack
  • Google Cloud Flexible Environment
  • Google Cloud SQL

General Idea

The main idea here is to help connecting each part who intervene while exchanging a used game (the one who has the game and the one who wants the game). It is basically it, but everyone should be asking, isn’t it what a Facebook group does? Well … yes, the difference here is that there are a bunch of different groups out there (at least here in Colombia) and even if there were only one group, the information is pretty unorganised, people publish several times the same game, or publish several games in the same post (i.e. not updating the status of the post properly for every game — sold or still in stock), because of that no one likes to search for the game they want, that means to search for the post and ask and contact if that person still has the game and negotiate its price, they prefer to create a new publication to buy (and not to sell) the game, so they will get several responses, not all of them about the game wanted.

But the “organize and connect the two parts” is not all, as important as those, TRUEQUE GAMER should centralise the information of used games. Without it, there would not be any real added value to the app.

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homepage

Summary

  • Is it free, the idea is to help players.
  • People can sell games there.
  • It can be expanded to sell consoles such as Xbox-One and PS4
  • Will it be open source? … Well, due to one of its main purposes is to centralize information, having different pages of the same app will be detrimental for it, so … perhaps it will.

So given that the main idea is to connect and centralise, here are the main functions.

What would be an app to connect two parties if you cannot search what you want. The search part here will work a little different from a normal search, it has different designs for searching something, this panel will have the following filters:

  • Used, New, Both.
  • Exchange, Selling, Both.
  • Text field.
  • Console (can select multiple)
  • By City and Country.

Internal chat

This is one of the most important parts. This should work perfectly, and I don’t mean it technically, how it works would allow a perfect communication between the two parties. I was thinking about copying Facebook’s chat to keep it simple but the designer decided to use another design. Perhaps it can show what games each party is selling or exchanging, to give some information, we also thought about showing information regarding the place of the delivery to make things faster.

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Working chat

Exchange or Sell games

This will allow adding games for selling or exchanging or both, pretty simple function. You will not be able to add names or create them, the name of the game must be the original one, based on the text you add several options will appear with the same name of the one you wrote and you should select the name of your video game, for this we are using the International Game DataBase (IGDB) (I really recommend it).

Notes

  1. Sadly the web page is offline, I developed it fully but I had too many compromises to look for users and sellers.
  2. The excellent designer does not have an online portfolio, otherwise, I would love to reference him here.