Pong of Champions Cup Tracker

Role
Frontend Software Engineer
Year
2024
Org
XP Network
Pong of Champions cup tracker running during the tournament

A live cup tracker for a beer pong tournament in Texas, built as a companion gadget for the XP Network platform and shipped to both app stores.

A cup tracker, and a field test

Axecade ran a Mystery Game Night beer pong tournament in Texas. They needed something to track cup eliminations and show progress live, to the players and to the room. I built it on React Native and Expo as a companion to the XP Network platform.

The other reason it existed was ours: XP Network's tournament system had never run an event in the physical world, and we wanted to find out what broke before a customer did.

What a bar does to your assumptions

Scoring a cup is one unambiguous tap, because a confirmation dialog is a thing nobody reads at a tournament and everybody dismisses wrongly. Latency stopped being a metric and became social: a scoreboard that lags is not slow, it is wrong, and the crowd sees the cup land before the screen does.

It shipped to both app stores and ran the event. More usefully, running our own logic on venue wifi in front of an audience surfaced things about sync and responsiveness that staging never would, because staging has good wifi and infinite patience.

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