Educational Esports Platform
We built the minimum viable product required to validate a new venture in scholastic esports.
Technologies used:
The Vision & Challenge
The competitive gaming world is served by dozens of tournament platforms, but nearly all are built for the general consumer. Educational institutions, with their unique needs for student management, security, and structured competition, have been left with tools that are not fit for purpose. This gap represented a clear market opportunity.
The client, an established esports company, identified this opportunity but faced a critical business problem. Committing to a full-scale platform without first validating market demand was a significant risk. They needed a way to test their hypothesis with a real product, capturing an initial user base of schools and organizers without overinvesting in features that might prove unnecessary.
They engaged us to engineer a focused minimum viable product. Our work centered on delivering the three essential pillars of the proposed service- a flexible user management system, automated tournament logic, and a multi-tenant architecture for schools. This approach provided the functional core needed to prove the concept and secure early adopters.
Project challenges
- The system needed to support four distinct user roles, from participants to high-level school administrators, each with specific and mutually exclusive permissions.
- A core requirement was an automated bracket engine capable of managing single and double-elimination tournaments, including participant seeding and match progression without manual oversight.
- To properly serve schools, the platform required a multi-tenant architecture that could provide each institution with a private, isolated environment for its students, teams, and internal events.
Solutions
- We implemented a role-based access control system within the Laravel backend. This provided a granular permissions structure that governed what each user type could see and do, ensuring data integrity and a tailored experience.
- A custom tournament engine was developed to handle the complex logic of bracket creation and management. This system processes match outcomes in real time to update standings and advance players automatically, removing a major administrative burden.
- Using a dedicated schema in MySQL, we established a multi-tenant framework where each school operates in its own sandboxed space. This allows for secure management of student rosters and the creation of private, school-only tournaments.
Technologies used
We are concerned about the security and performance of our customers. That's why we always keep updating and use best technologies in our products
Front-end
JavaScript
ReactJS
HTML5
CSS3
Back-end
PHP
Laravel
DevOps
Linux
Docker
Digital Ocean
Database
MySQL
Dedicated School Administration
This module gives each educational institution its own private administrative space on the platform. School administrators can manage student accounts, create official teams, and host internal tournaments that are visible only to their students. This provides a secure, controlled environment for scholastic competition, addressing a key need that general-purpose platforms ignore.
Automated Bracket Generation
The platform's engine automates the most time-consuming part of tournament organization. It supports both single and double-elimination formats, correctly seeds participants based on skill, and advances them through the bracket as match results are reported. This removes the potential for human error and allows organizers to manage larger events with less effort.