Community Statement - Retro Rewind

Mario Kart Wii is a beloved game from my childhood. As such, I was pleasantly surprised to hear of a modded verion of the game, Retro Rewind. Retro Rewind brings 130 new tracks from other games in the Mario Kart series as well as several new gamemodes and online play. When I first played the game I enjoyed it more than I ever had before and sank many hours into the game. I eventually got better at the game and participated in a few competitive events, called “MOGI” events or MOGI lounges. After every MOGI event the scores are posted on a separate website for small gaming tournaments. When I was tasked for making my student innovation project. I thought about all of these things and thought it would make for a perfect idea!

 

My idea for the project was a webscraper that took leaderboard information, creates a table, transforms the information so that only relevant data is shown and posts it to a separate application. This will eliminate the need to go to the website and search for your results. This would help many people who play MOGIs in Retro Rewind save time.

 

I spoke briefly with staff members of the Retro Rewind community on Discord about making such an application and they said it was okay for me to work on the project. I have now completed a working demo, which I have listed on my GitHub page for others to use with the help of a virtual environment.

 

This project is relevant to my field of study, data science. It is relevant to data science because of the web scraping functionality, which utilizes an API call to retrieve leaderboard data from a website. It also transforms data with the use of a python library, pandas. I used python to code this project as it has many data science libraries that make coding easier. I have worked on projects in the past where I take data from a source and transform it, so I have some experience with doing this already. I have also verified that my demo works, is accurate, and can be implemented effectively.

 

In the future, after a few tweaks to the design and execution of the project, I hope to speak with the Retro Rewind staff about my project. My endgame for this project is to implement it into Retro Rewind’s game launcher, Wheel Wizard. I will listen to the feedback they give me and use it to improve the project and better implement it into the game launcher.