My first time working on a Node.js Project

I came up with this idea as part of a "Genius hour" project in in the 8th grade. We were supposed to work on some sort of challenge across the span of a few weeks.

Ever since I was little and started using Scratch to build games, I had tried to develop a multiplayer game engine using what Scratch called "cloud variables", however they were limited to only 10 per project, making it nearly impossible to make a functional game.

So even though I had never used Node.js or Express.js ever, I decided to undertake the project of builiding this game in Node.js.

Challenges

It took me weeks of work along with looking up tutorials on how to use Node.js and Socket.io to enable the real-time websocket communication, and it became very frustrating when the time came to render the game properly on users' screens.

The issue is that since i was using an HTML Canvas element to render the game and I had to build out my own game engine, the game map did not actually exist, it was just some Javascript code that limited players' movement past a certain point.

On top of that, this meant that players would have to be dynamically rendered on a different position on each user's screen, because they were not actually on a fixed position on a map, they were at a certain position relative to the virtual map box and other players.

This made it really challenging to figure out player offsets for each player, but eventually I ended up making it work, although I had to scrap some of the more advanced features I had originally planned (e.g. charging up snow, reviving other players, etc...) since the assignment deadline was coming soon.

All in all, it was a project I felt proud of building since it took me a lot of effort to learn many different concepts (including trig) as I was building the game from the ground-up.