🔦 Community Spotlight - Building Banquise, the TikTok of Games🔦

Highlighting projects from the Appwrite community

Introduction

With Appwrite’s developer community growing significantly, we want to take the time to appreciate and showcase some amazing applications built by our community. Maybe you’ll be inspired by these projects to build something amazing with Appwrite, too!

This month, we’d like to give the spotlight to the Arbarétier brothers, who built a successful app called Banquise. Let’s get started by interviewing them to learn more about their project and journey.

Tell us more about who you are

Hi, we’re Baudouin and Louis Arbarétier, two brothers from France and video-games enthusiasts. Our common passion brought us to build a platform at the crosspoint between creativity and engineering : Banquise.

What is the name of the project you built?

Banquise (pronounced ban-kiz, meaning “pack-ice” in French).
Come chat with us on discord

Why did you decide to build this? What inspired you?

We have always been amazed at how online communities pushed creativity further when given the right tools. So we wanted to give a breath of fresh air to the current state of mobile gaming and social-medias.

What is the Banquise?

Banquise is a social-media but instead of pictures and videos, they're minigames.
Anybody can create minigames (no code) on their browser or phone super easily! We spent a lot of effort on making it as simple yet powerful as possible.
You can see all the minigames of the community on the main feed and scroll through without loading times as if you were on Instagram or TikTok.

What technologies did you use to create it and how did you use each technology?

Client - Flutter was the obvious choice as we wanted a reliable solution to bring our platform to as many people as possible, without the need of a bigger team. Flutter allows us to publish our app on iOS, Android and Web with very little adjustments.
Server - We are so proud and happy to be using Appwrite as our whole backend. The database is very solid and secure by default which allowed us to peacefully focus on the front-end side of the project. The Appwrite cloud functions supplement the database perfectly for more complex logic specific to our project.
Dashboards/internal tools - This project requires a few dashboards for admins and professional users, which we are currently building in Svelte. The magic of Appwrite is that there are SDKs on pretty much every platform you can think of and svelte js is amongst them.

Who is your target audience and how will it help them to learn more about your project?

The project is very recent, so our target audience is mostly video game enthusiasts and creative people. We expect that it will also appeal to a larger audience over time.
Banquise allows you to create pretty much anything without needing to worry about the “how”. It’s very convenient and fun to create anything out of your imagination.
It’s also a super fun way to discover original creations and interact with other players.

What issues did you run into while building this project and how did you solve them?

The major issue we ran into was probably the UI/UX design of the app. The game creator interface had to be stripped down to the bare essential to have the clearest experience for casual creators. Our mission is to make game creation accessible to anyone, on any device or screen.

Also during the publication of the application on the App store and Play store, a lot of requests were made by Google and Apple, asking us to add “Sign-in with Apple” or other security features.
Thanks to Appwrite’s super easy authentication setup and database we managed to push those changes pretty quickly and in a very secure way – more than if we had to implement them by hand.

How did Appwrite help your project?

What we loved about Appwrite is how straightforward it is. In no time our back-end was up and running so we could focus on the client.
When we had any question about Appwrite, the community was very responsive to answer.
Appwrite’s cloud functions system was also a huge help. It allowed us to segment our backend business logic into distinct pieces of code. And the icing on the cake is that these functions can run all major programming languages.

What are a couple of things you wish you knew before starting the project?

Being more comfortable with Docker
Having a broader view on all the different use cases of Banquise, which is important in order to build an efficient UI that speaks to all types of users.