Space Battle

Inspiration

We always have numerous game ideas together and this was one of our favorites. We thought the hackathon would be a perfect opportunity to delve into this project and learn a lot along the way.

What it does

Our app is a multiplayer space ship flying game with 8-bit graphics. It allows numerous people to connect and fly their space ship together around the environment of stars we created.

How we built it

We built this app using node.js along with socket.io for the server and phaser.io for the game engine.

Challenges we ran into

Our largest challenge that prevented us from adding more features that we had planned on (from a time standpoint), was connecting each separate client to the server and getting them all to communicate with each other. This presented many issues. The biggest issue that caused this was our method of movement. The original version was designed for the user's space ship to stay locked at the middle of the window, with the stars map sprite moving around to create the illusion of movement to the user. The struggle with this was that not every space ship had a permanent spot on this coordinate grid of stars, rather each of their own coordinate grids were constantly moving around. We tried for hours to come up with a solution and finally succeeded.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our perseverence and hard work and accomplishment of getting the most integral part of our program working. Once we can get multiple users on a server the list of possibilities increases immensely.

What we learned

We learned a lot about client-server interaction and how to transmit data between the two.

What's next for Space Battle

For our demo for this competition we would've loved to add these several features, but will still continue to add them even after the competition is over. First and foremost, an object to the game is the next feature that will be implemented. We will add lasers and hit-points for each user to provide some action. The graphics and sound effects are already created for this feature. A chat box will be the next feature implemented after this.

Built With

• css3
• express.js
• html5
• javascript
• node.js
• nodemon
• phaser.io
• socket.io