MetaPlay

Gamers track what they play across scattered notes, spreadsheets, and memory. Our brief was a single place to discover games, build a collection, and review them, backed by real game data rather than a static seed list.

I worked in a five-person team and owned the front-end and back-end integration. I built the authentication layer, with bcrypt-hashed email and password login plus Google sign-in through Passport, across separate admin, user and guest permissions, and designed the nine-table relational schema behind collections, reviews, friends and groups.

When the course ended, so did everyone else's involvement. A year later I came back to it on my own, traced the broken OAuth and deployment configuration, wired it to live RAWG game data, and put it into production.

Then the original host's trial ran out and the database went with it. I moved the app to Render and migrated the data layer from MySQL to PostgreSQL, which taught me more about deployment than the first launch did.

It runs live today with personal collections (wishlist, currently playing, completed), reviews, friends and groups, and an admin dashboard, pulling real-time data from the RAWG API. The deployed version of a team project that I took the rest of the way and shipped myself.

Deployment is part of the product, not the last step of it. Most of what broke on the way back to production was configuration nobody had looked at since the demo.