What Is This Project?
This time last year, I was looking on FaceBook groups trying to find somewhere to play OnePageRules. There seems to be a lack of players this side of the country and even though I posted on the groups, there was a real lack of response. What I found though, was one of the guys who made a post on one of the groups mentioned they lived in the same village as I did and looking at their profile, I recognized one of the cars. If this was the same guy, he literally lived 30 seconds from me…
This got me wondering, how many people did we live near that play these kinds of games, but you just didn’t know it. Not everyone can deal with new groups (myself included), but want one or two people to play games with, either because they don’t have people in their lives who are interested in them, or because they don’t have friends. So I started putting plans together to try and bring people together.
The idea for Find Your Party was born.
The First Draft
The first draft of the site was the ability to set your location, then based off of that you were able to see how many other users there were within a certain radius. For privacy you were not told where they were in relation, only a rough distance. You could then message users to arrange games. The biggest issue I felt with this was the safety of users. I didn’t want people arranging to meet others at their homes or things like that. So I introduced “Gaming Hubs”, these will either be shops or gaming clubs which you can go to and meet there to play games. These places appear on the map within your chosen radius so users can see their local hubs.
This is the state I launched the site in, back in April. When we went to Salute 2025 I took the opportunity to advertise the site, hand out business cards and try to drum up some interest. There was a lot of positive response, unfortunately it didn’t convert into many sign ups.
Something Needed to Change
After many discussions with a couple of friends, it became obvious that the current format was probably the wrong way to go about it. By having a one to one direct messaging system it poses two issues, firstly, starting a conversation with one person needs one person to actually reach out. This is difficult to do for people who are socially anxious, and as someone who is, not sure why I thought that was the right direction! Secondly, this adds a big hurdle to arranging groups of players.
Round 2
To change things up and make it more approachable for as many people as possible, I swapped out the idea of messaging other people directly, to taking the name of the site as a literal and added the ability to create a party. This gave me better flexibility to bringing people together. I think the biggest thing I was contending with was the social anxiety aspect. By allowing people to create a party, they can flag their groups as friendly to people who suffer from anxiety. Being in new settings with people you don’t know is tough, and this flag tells you that you that there should be no pressure put on you as a player to step any further out of your comfort zone than you want to. It also creates the understanding that if the player gets overwhelmed, there will be no questions if you just up and leave.
Aside from the anxiety focus, it also allows people to display the games they want to play and how many people they are looking for to join them. This new approach feels a lot better for the type of platform I am trying to build.
Has It Helped?
Well no… While I haven’t made a huge attempt to market the site since the changes were made, I did post it in a UK based gaming discord I am part of, hoping that being an active member of a group always looking for games, it would have been received better than it did. Unfortunately that is not how it went. This honestly discouraged me quite a bit, I have let the project go since then because I just can’t get into the groove of working on it and pushing it forward.
I have to pick the project back up and move to the next phase.
Which is…
One of my good friends is convinced that it would be better received if it was an app as well as a website. Unfortunately, as a web developer with other interests, I haven’t got the time to put into learning how to develop a native app. However, there are a couple of tricks I can try and use before I have to fall back to writing a dedicated app.
I am hoping I can use Capacitor to build an app version as part of the website build process. I don’t know if that will work, ChatGPT says it will, but I know better than to take that things word as gospel. If that fails to work, I will have to go for my fallback choice. There are 2 choices I could go for, Flutter or Native. While I would like to learn Flutter, Native has a Svelte version, which just so happens to be the framework used for the front end.
So while I would like to reduce the need to duplicate my work, at least if I needed to use Native, I would have a head start and I can copy 90% of the work over. I would just need to make an API to interface with the site. But yea, I am keeping my fingers crossed for the Capacitor, apparently it just packages it into a webview and utilizes the PWA function if a site.
So Why Not a PWA?
Well the problem with PWAs, while the better option in my opinion, there is no real market place opportunity. You can have a TWA (Trusted Web App) added to the play store, there is no such thing for Apple. My mate feels that relying to people needing to navigate to the website and clicking install for a PWA, if you don’t know what it is, then there is that trust barrier of knowing what you are installing. I have also heard PWAs can be a bit ropy on iPhones…
Moving Forward!
So the next step for me with this project is to experiment with Capacitor. I would love to use a platform such as KickStarter to try and boost engagement and get the word out. I have been doing a little investigating into how I can do this because using it straight up as an advertisement just isn’t allowed. Backers must be able to get something tangible at the end of it.
With that I have a couple of ideas. I can offer a mug and t-shirt (courtesy of my sister) as a pledge level, named and shamed on a supporter page and potentially a hub level which will give complete lifetime free access to any future paid features that could be offered to hubs in the future. Also depending on the approach I need to take to create the app an “early access” will be the main focus of the KickStarter. This should get past any barriers for the restrictions.
This isn’t really about the money, although always nice and it can be used to advertise, it is more about the exposure it will hopefully garner. There are other platforms I can also put this onto, IndieGogo etc if KickStarter fails. I dunno, I have come so far but feel so far away with this project I don’t want it to die, I just need word to get out, without it costing me an arm and a leg that I don’t have for marketing efforts.
I will reach out to a couple of communities to find out costs for a blog post of something. But I am running out of ideas to get this going, it is costing me money every month for it doing nothing, so not something I can continue to sustain if it is sat idle.
Other Ideas To Push It Forward
With my recent obsession with TTRPGs, I have had the idea of using it in conjunction with setting up “Learn TTRPGs” I want to try and do at my local community hub. Using the platform to allow people to sign up to take part in the group. This will at least get peoples eyes on the site and might get the ball rolling in that respect.
My boss did have another business idea I could use to tie into this too! But that one is no where near worth mentioning right now, but could have legs!
Anyway, enough of that for now. I have plenty on my plate.
Much Love <3