Inspiration
Our inspiration was to create a fun and simple game that can be enjoyed casually as well as competitively against your friends. Something with minimal rules and based purely on skill, Sword Swarm is what we developed.
What it does
There's two game modes, free play and multiplayer. The first one, free play, starts off with a random combination of swords that can be pointed in 4 directions, up, right, left, and down. Press the arrow keys in the order of the swords sequence and you proceed to the next round, where the combination of swords keep getting longer and longer. Multiplayer is played with 2 people on the same computer, taking turns typing a combination of 4 keys, but they disappear after 3 second countdown. Its best of 3 rounds, where we tally up the total amount of time spent on each round, and the person with the faster time wins.
How we built it
We used JavaScript for the functionality of the webpage, used HTML for the text, and CSS to make everything look nice and aligned.
Challenges we ran into
Initially we wanted to use python, but we decided to go towards a website route, and all of us had very limited experience in JavaScript so most of our time was spent learning. When working with CSS, we had a lot of trouble getting the Flex boxes to align properly as well as scaling with the size of the screen, but we didn't have the time to account for smaller screens like mobile phones. We wanted to implement an API for openAI that takes the statistics that we collected and present them in a more interesting manner, but we couldn't solve it after spending hours on so.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Worked together smoothly under tight time constraints Communicated constantly to divide tasks and stay on track Helped each other debug and polish different parts of the game Built a working two-player game with alternating turns and combo validation Implemented real-time key press handling and animations Designed a countdown timer, scoring system, and win logic Added a reset flow with a “Play Again” button and persistent win counter Tracked and displayed missed keys for performance feedback Used sword icons for arrow keys to enhance the visual theme Created a clean and responsive layout for gameplay and scoreboard Added visual effects for key presses to make the game feel interactive
What we learned
Learned new coding languages: JavaScript and CSS Improved our HTML skills and applied them in a real-world project Implemented key features like timers, animations, event handling, and DOM updates — all within 24 hours Learned how to debug and test features quickly under time pressure Got hands-on experience with responsive layout and user interaction design
What's next for Sword Swarm
The next step is to make a more complete version, where we made more modifiers and game modes to make the game more fun and exciting, as well as challenging the user.
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