Games 🕹

Games 🕹 is ready!

Hope you enjoy!

How did it all start?

In Spring 2017, I took my very first programming class called ‘Object Oriented Programming.’ I took that class with curiosity, but not knowing this class would change everything. The class was taught in Java and I still remember how excited I was when I decided to create my very first Snake Game. To my surprise creating game was actually something very enjoyable and very rewarding, especially when you discover your friends interact and play the game.

With all the good things on the side, there was something else that I realized that could make the experience of playing the game more gratifying: Creating a High Score for all other friends could compete. When one of my friend, Chris, was playing the game he asked me what my High Score for the Snake Game was I told him the score and I saw him enjoying the game even better, wanting to beat me badly (he did eventually). I realized this can be huge benefit to the user experience to see what other people’s score is and make the game more competitive, especially if the High Score that is higher than yours is by someone you already know.

With this point in mind, it was obvious of what I should do: Re-create a Snake Game with High Score display functionality. However I realized there was something that has bigger potential.

Game Forum

Making games is something that I found very rewarding and fun. I learn a lot of things in the process and the fact that other people can enjoy the game is definitely a huge motivation boost. I realized, in long term, I would create, not just the Snake Game, but other games as well for other people to play. This made me to come up with an idea to create a Game Forum, which is like a website that holds all collection of games that I made and allow user to play the games that I made on the spot. I decided to call this forum, Games 🕹.

Games 🕹

Games 🕹 is a collection of the games that I made for other people to play. Currently it tracks High Score globally for each of the games (Currently, Dec 26, 2018 - there is only one game, but more to come) and people can compete with it. I thought of creating an account system where people can log in and join to play - but according to my friend, they just wanted to hop in and play. I thought that was not a bad idea so I made it open for public.

Nerdy Stuffs

When deciding what and how I should build my forum, the Front-End was pretty easy: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However I did had to think about whether I should be hosting my games individually in their own GitHub repositories or feed them on single GitHub repository (Games Forum repository). I eventually ended up doing the second option, by making all the games to live on the forum repository, assuming the Games that I will create would not be too big. For any games that are rather big (with multiple large sprites, audio, video etc) I think it would be then appropriate to create a separate repository for its own. You can visit the GitHub repository for the Game Forum here.

Planning the Back-End system was something that was a challenge, since I would having find a way to build and manage a server and database as well. However I realized using Firebase seem to solve both of these problems, with advantage of ease to use.

In the future, there would definitely be changes made to the architecture of the forum and the games, in the ways of it being served, also with the architecture of managing the database for the scores, id etc.

I’ve always dreamed about building my own collection of games and this is definitely something that is very exciting, I really look forward growing this space in coming times! In a meantime, please feel free to visit and enjoy Games 🕹!