Dev Build Update: Rivals II (Nov 18, 2024)

Hey everyone!

Rivals II is now in the Patreon build! This is especially exciting because it is our first step beyond Smash.

What does Rivals II support look like?

Ideally this just looks like the same old Smashers App but with a new sport available. 

Under the hood, we've refactored the whole app to make it easier to add new games. Most of the data views were thankfully already sport agnostic, but many of the inputs/settings were hardcoded to ultimate/melee.

There were a few places where we had to rethink the UI as we add new games. For example, the "manage groups for player" sheet was getting unruly when it showed a checkbox for every sport so we made it focus on a single sport at a time.

What's left for Rivals?

As far as Rivals work goes, there's a handful of places we want to focus on:

• Getting it ready for a public launch in December

• Cleaning up the dataset w/ merges

• Establishing some sort of TTS so we can prioritize more notable events

• Adding alts in a way that is sane (Kragg has 30+ alts already!)

• Adding stages (startgg doesn't support them yet)

• Improving our player notability heuristics for sports with less data than ult/melee

• Adding Rivals 1 support

These last 2 points build towards the same idea - oftentimes in the FGC (and especially with the launch of new games), the notable storyline transcends the specific game you're looking at. How should the Smashers App handle multi-sport rivalries and legacy?

We've been thinking about this a lot.

What's next?

We're going to be adding more perks to the app that were previously only available via the dev website. Specifically, the ability to set your alts and customize your notable wins/placements.

For the end of the year, we're hoping to tackle a few more things:

• Startgg Write API perks for TOs

• Keep improving the private live scraper

• VoDs + stream queue support

• A "Spotify Recap" style feature for players to celebrate their 2024

• Prep for our larger FGC expansion

That's a lot of things in not that much time, we hope you'll join us for the ride.

Thanks for reading and see ya next time!