As a group of 6 developers, we had the freedom to pursue any topic for a semester long project. After long discussions, we settled on creating a copy of once popular Daily NBA Fantasy game on Facebook. It was already announced that our biggest competitor was about to shut down, so we wanted to create the game for ourselves to enjoy in the near future.

The main idea of the game is to pick five real NBA players everyday with budget contrains, to assemble the most efficient possible lineup. Then, based on real life stats and official basketball fantasy score formula, the winners were announced.

One of our initial goals was deciding on the player cost formula, so each user could not select the five best NBA players at that day. Besides, we also wanted to display as much information about upcoming matchups and players stats on our site, so we had to rely on several data sources.

During the semester, while following agile principles, we achieved the basic functionality. Lineup page, Leaderboards, Player Stats tables and charts, Friends system, Daily Jobs that calculate all scores and games were implemented.

Afterwards, only fellow developer Mantas Naidzinavičius and I have decided to continue working on the game, eventually releasing it to the public a year after its initial development has begun. We redid the design, launched the game as PWA, and optimized the performance and SEO for the game while steadily growing user-base. As we did not announce our game anywhere and shared it with only our friends, we had steady amount of up to 12 daily players.

As our bachelor thesis project work was about commence, Mantas decided to keep working on Fantasy Hoops as his bachelor project. During this time he implemented thorough tournament system, achievements, optimized jobs and covered the codebase with tests.

Both of us were already working at KAYAK by that time, so our time and motivation has eventually diminished and we decided to stop the project for the time being.