Pepe Tapia

AI Coach for Video Games

Helping players spend less time learning and more time gaming.

Lowering the barrier of entry, Expanding the skill ceiling.

Casual and competitive players share the same process of learning and improving, but the time needed to improve is getting longer! Meru is an application built with the purpose of helping players learn and improve quick through personalized coaching.

Creating a full stack application

By leveraging AI/ML, I was able to streamline relevant actionable feedback to the user so they can spend more time gaming and less time learning.

Personalized iterations.

We use the Riot Games API to ingest and process game data. Using my esports coaching experience, I would coach users, understand their pain points, and translate my solutions into a full stack application.

Results

Every user is onboarded with a personal touch. I spend time with each user to understand them outside of gaming. Whether you're a 9-5 worker, pro esports player, or casual gamer, everyone deserves a personalized experience.

Applied AI Full Stack Developer

As an Applied AI Full Stack Developer, I was responsible for the entire software development lifecycle. The challenges for this application helped me learn more about Frontend, Backend, and taking an application to production level witht low latency and high availability. I also learned a lot about managing tradeoffs regarding Architecture, technoogies, and prioritizing a user's experience.

Intro to Meru

Holistic Design

Meru began in September 2022 as a passion project shared by me and my girlfriend and Product Owner, Risa. Meru, derived from "Mount Meru" or "Mount Sumeru", is known to be the center of the universe in many religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, with the location varying from the North Pole to the Himalayas. There is slight controversy on the existence of the mountain, which I appreciate as a methaphor for the project.

The Mt. Meru we have in India's Garhwal Himalayas, not to be confused with the religious mountain, is known to be significantly harder to climb compared to Mt. Everest. Less than a dozen people have reached the summit, and it is considered one of the most difficult mountains to climb. We appreciate this is a metaphor for pursuing greatness and learning from the journey - not the destination. This is often the case for many goals in life, whether it be competitive gaming or software development.

We want to provide users with an elegant way of learning and improving their gameplay, providing them with guidance on their journey. While Meru is spans many cultures and relgions, we developed a color palette based on Japanese culture and traditional Japanese flowers - the Sakura, Kiku-no-hana, and Ajisai.

Fundamentals of Frontend

Uniformity, good practice, and more.

As a codebase grows, it is important to keep the codebase clean and consistent. Understanding the context that I was learning frontend, I knew that it was important not to wait until I get into a big company to learn and appreciate good practice.

Good practice is not only there to make your life easier, but to also make it easier for other developers to communicate.

Jose Antonio Pepe Tapia