This tool was developed for PhD student Nico Young's post-doc paper, to gather data on the top games of the speedrunning platform Speedrun.com; players can use this site to submit and compete their times to beat games in short amount of times.
The tool uses the webdriver "Selenium" to gather information out of the html code of the website, and consolidates this to a Microsoft Excel table for quick sorting and analysis.
I employed the Selenium Webdriver, which can be used to create a remote web browser which can be navigated using scripts. By searching the HTML of the website, containers featuring the top games can be extracted, and their names and active player count can be read and submitted to the spreadsheet. To get the desired amount of results required, the URL can be manipulated to take it to multiple pages and gather more data.
The games are then written to an excel spreadsheet using a script and the Excel API, they are then automatically placed into a table so that the user can quickly sort the player counts of the games. A backup of the file is also made in-case of an error during this process.
Creating this tool was a unique challenge as this is the first serious non game-adjacent programming project I have undertook. But it was an interesting experience, as I got to use unfamiliar tools and methods to complete it. I wanted to create a tool that required as little user input as possible, was easy to operate, and results were easy to organize, which involved an examination into its user experience. Working with a PhD. Student was exciting opportunity to network outside of my environment.