Code Royale

start of slide show
The player experience

Inspiration

We are all coders here, we know it can be boring sitting around all day trying to code some solutions to some random complex problem. But it doesn't have to be that way, that why we introduced Code Royale, which brings a new experience to coding.

What it does

Essentially a user can attempt to join a online match, which match makes him with any player from around the world. Once queued up, these players are prompted with one interview coding question. In order to win, the player must have either found a solution quicker, or have had a more optimal solution (these are weighted in order to determine the winner). The player also has a blurred screen of his opponents code editor, so that they can get an idea of how that player might be doing, and also for a little more intensity. We also have a chat log where users can talk with one another while they are in a match. This is because we all love some good ol' trash talk, it brings a much more competitive vibe. Players are also capable of emoting in order to taunt their opponents. Asides from classic 1v1 matches, we also offer an ability to play with friends by creating rooms or joining a room by a code. Additionally, winners of matches will earn trophies which can put them higher on the global, weekly, and daily leaderboard. Code Royale can also be called Code Royale RANKED, due to the fact that users are queued by similar trophy count, therefore the higher the trophy count, the harder the opponents, thus the harder the problems needed to be solved.

How we built it

We used React for the front end, and express + node + websockets for the backend, along with firebase for user authentication + authorization, and to store information about the user.

Challenges we ran into

Most of us were fairly new to hackathons, so we were new to organizing and figuring out what we needed to do.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to come up with an idea and actually became capable of implementing it. This is something we are all proud of as it seemed nearly impossible at the very beginning.

What we learned

We learned how to implement web sockets for a live time interaction across multiple users, which was something all of us never knew before hand.

What's next for Code Royale

We hope to attract a user base that seeks to find the "fun" in coding, and to be able to expand the user base so that we a large diverse and competitive group of people using our project.