A respository for my "Hendy's Hunches" football competition application.
Hendy's Hunches has grown over the years from an idea that I had, back in 2005, for a little game to add some fun to World Cup 2006. Today, it has become something of a project that I have developed in my spare time around the clock (see below for the history). The online version began back in 2013 and, despite the coding of it throwing many challenges, it appears to have added some fun to the big competitions and I am very pleased with that.
The first origins of Hendy's Hunches was a very monotonous process which consisted simply of sending friends a basic spreadsheet template, having them input their scores for each game and return it to me before the competition began. It was flaky at best although it did seem to be well perceived by those who had taken part. I'd spend a couple of hours a day trauling through each player's spreadsheet and manually calculating points before sending a daily email update of a table with scores and rankings. Despite the tedious effort, it left me thinking that it would be great to repeat the event again some time in the future.
In need of dusting off my programming skills, I thought it would be good to replicate the 2006 spreadsheet fun for World Cup 2014 - only bigger and better. The hardest things I had to decide on were 1) what format a site would take for it (look and feel), 2) what each player could expect to do (on a basic level), and 3) a points mechanism that would be fair and present good competition. Users were pointed to an online form which they completed all predictions (only for the group stages) in one go. Then, after each game I would enter results into a page and points were given automatically based on players' predictions against a result. A table of rankings kept everyone's points tally. Not too pretty but reasonably efficient.
Determined to build on the success of the World Cup 2014 version, feedback and positive suggestions saw significant improvements. Not all changes were widely visible as a lot of the 'under the hood' mechanics were reworked. Some of the most major improvements included a statistics dashboard, improved rankings system, better in-game communication methods and the ability to make changes to a prediction just before kick-off. All now sits behind a new and secure login facility and I look forward to future improvements.