Playup - Next Goal

The Concept

Next Goal is a mobile optimised web game that allows users to predict which player and team will score the next (or first) goal in a football match. For correct guesses users receive a number of points based on the community consensus - the more unlikely their correct prediction, the more points they get. Users can then view their position in the overall league table or their position in a league consisting of their social network friends.

The Technology

Users can register/login using Facebook Connect, Twitter or an email address and password. Next Goal is also fully localised and internationalised, supporting seven languages from launch including English, Spanish and Japanese.

The site was built with an MVC structure, using PHP and the Zend Framework, with a MySQL data store. This linked to a frontend built using jQuery Mobile. Extensive use of the framework's components was made including Zend_Db, Zend_Locale and Zend_Translate, thus allowing many of the project's components to be reusable. It is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) using the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and the Relational Database Service (RDS). A number of 3rd party APIs are utilised including Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth, MailChimp and SendGrid.