What is Anicropedia?
Anicropedia is a website that I worked on at KTH during the spring semester of 2022. The idea behind the website was to be a companion website for the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It allows users to manage all collectible items, villagers, and music tracks from the game. It also features a music player to play the music from the game. Animal Crossing: New Horizons plays hourly music that changes depending on the weather in the game. We took that idea and applied it to the time and weather in real-life. Depending on the location of the user, the website will play the hourly music from the game fitting for the hour and weather at that location.
Development and Design
Development of Anicropedia took place between March and May of 2022. I worked on the project with Adam Cerven, Benjamin Esdor and Sindri Pétursson. Each week we sat down and setup a sprint plan for the week. This allowed us to stay on top of what everyone should be doing and made sure that work was progressing on the project. At the start of the project we decided to focus on UX and we wanted to make the website in the same style as Animal Crossing: New Horizons as that would feel familiar to users of the website. So the whole layout and design of the website is inspired by how the interfaces in the game look.
We began by designing the layout in Figma, and I designed the home, settings, and the info page. After having the initial layout ready we could start development. I worked a lot on the backend of the website; setting up the user authentication and database for storing all of the collectible items. We used Firebase for the authentication and database. I also made the encyclopedia page, which could then be used as a base for the collectibles page, as the layout was very similar. Later on in the project I also made the settings, login and signup pages and all of the functionality behind them. I learned a lot to work with promises and callbacks during that process.
I learned a lot during this whole project, especially the importance of starting early and planning. Since we started early we could put a lot of effort into the website and managed to implement everything we wanted. The group worked really well together and we had multiple meetings during each week to discuss the project and plan ahead.