SmashBrackets
Entertainment
A more hands-on music discovery experience for music lovers, musicians/artists, and creatives through gamification.
When SmashBrackets initially approached us to build an iPhone application, they had an intriguing idea on how they could create a more engaging music discovery platform. How? By adding a gamification layer concept so that music discovery would be more akin to March Madness.
We were intrigued, so our team drafted a plan on how this concept could be transformed into a fully-realized game.
We considered, how could we create a game that would encourage users to share the experience with friends and family? Second, how would you discover new music and branch out of your comfort zone when it comes to preferred music genres? Third, how could we make this game scalable, both in user growth and its ability to stay technologically current?
Carefully over the course of several months, we worked with the SmashBrackets team to design a user interface that was visually vibrant and stimulating, but also not overwhelming. How could we incorporate music into a game engine that closely matched March Madness’ gameplay mechanics, but also transfer its social dynamics to encourage competition, sharing, and real-time communication? Could the concept be monetized?
We concluded that SmashBrackets needed a robust administrator backend that would allow them to run the show.
SmashBrackets is literally fueled by competition, which is why we immediately concluded during the project planning phase that a robust, easy-to-use, and scalable administrator backend was necessary for the application to be durable for the long haul. As we believe with all of our clients, we did not want SmashBrackets to feel dependent on our services if they wanted to make future updates to their app.
The key was to program the SmashBrackets application so that it could be easily manageable and operationally reliable. SmashBrackets would have advanced functionality from the get-go, with features such as real-time commenting, a badge-earning reward system, bracket predictions, profile following, activity, leaderboards, push notifications, and more.
Some of the technology that we supported when we created the SmashBrackets app
SmashBrackets was built as an iPhone application using Swift, REST APIs, and made to support iOS 10 and 11. On the administrator and server-side, we used PHP with Laravel. The frontend website was created using WordPress, HTML5, and CSS3.
Are you impressed with SmashBrackets? Hire us to help you with your app too!
We're a full stack design & development agency that is as hands-on as a CTO+Team out of the box. It is much harder to find a team with great chemistry that has the shared talent to back it up, and we take pride in our effort to achieve both.
Schedule a consultation with us
Do you have a question about how we built SmashBrackets? Give us a call at (800) 490-1476 or drop us an email at Hello@ChopDawg.com. We’d be happy to help!