Inspiration
Two video games heavily inspired this project: Balatro by LocalThunk and Marathon by Bungie. I combined the item rarity system of Marathon with the random joker generation of Balatro. Both games share strong psychological and mechanical ties to gambling. Dopamine hits are obtained from the fulfillment of receiving higher rarity or "better" items. I'm a software engineer by trade, and I deeply love playing and analyzing video games. The first game I ever played, and beat was Donkey Kong Country for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance when I was a child. I've played, analyzed, and beat hundreds of video games across multiple genres and there is still much left for me to play and learn about. I have been learning about game development on my spare time and aspire to make a video game of my own one day that entertains millions the way I have been entertained throughout my life. The video games in Lore Kards overall are my inspiration and motivation for any game development that I engage in.
What it does
Lore Kards provides an opportunity for gamers to learn interesting lore about 100 of the most influential video games of all time. It requires them to come back daily to learn new lore. Some lore, they may already be familiar with and receive a small hit of nostalgia. Other lore for titles they are not so familiar with may invoke curiosity to learn more about the video game or even try the video game for themselves. Either case, whether it be nostalgia or curiosity, may lead to the player discussing these titles with other redditors in relevant subreddits.
How I built it
This is my first time using React.js so I spent some time reading the documentation online to understand the basics. I started by writing down all the components needed for this React.js project. I created each of the components with a minimal UI. Then, I focused on writing the APIs by analyzing the boilerplate project code to understand how everything connects together through hooks and dependency injection. I did have to read a bit about redis to understand the methods available to persist user data. During development, I tested Lore Kards by sending mock responses in the APIs to test various scenarios. I completed the project a few days ago and have been doing real end-to-end testing on two separate reddit accounts for the past few days for my final testing.
Challenges I ran into
The main challenge I had was a conceptual one. It took me some time to fully comprehend how the frontend React components would interact with the APIs written in the backend. I had a lot of fun working on this for the most part and I'm very thankful for the Devvit tools provided!
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud to have figured out how to connect the backend with the frontend, that was a bit overwhelming for me initially. I understood the frontend and backend in isolation, but I couldn't fully connect the two at first. I've come to understand how the two are connected, at least via the Devvit web architecture which uses React.js and Hono by default. I'm also proud of completing something alone without help from anyone. I forced myself to debug and figure things out with the tools available on my computer and the internet.
What I learned
I learned how to create React components, how to use redis to persist data, and how to use Hono as my backed for APIs. I even learned some basics of Tailwind CSS, although I did use generative AI to help me enhance the project's CSS since there were some things I couldn't fully figure out how to achieve with my limited knowledge of Tailwind CSS.
What's next for Lore Kards - Daily Unveil
After the hackathon, I plan on sending Lore Kards for review to publish it on reddit and make it available for playing on relevant gaming subreddits. I'll probably make more games for reddit and learn phaser perhaps.
Built With
- hono
- node.js
- react.js
- tailwind-css
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