Writer's Block

Inspiration

Our love for games through the connections and fun memories makes throughout cultures and communities. The competitive typing race community also inspired us in this topic of the culture of typing 200 words per minute creates awe but also creates a gap between people who hand-write verse type. We could not find an alternative to the tools used in typing for writing, such as typing tests, typing practices, or even a race to compare other handwriting speeds; we saw a gap in online handwriting tooling and wanted to develop a solution to provide tooling but also an enjoyable experience to have with others.

What it does

The project is an online multiplayer handwriting race, where given a writing input area, the players try to be the first to complete a random assortment of the Top 1000 most common English words. First place gets the pride of knowing their the best of the players!

How we built it

The website is built in Vanilla JavaScript, CSS, and HTML utilizing Google Firebase for the online functionality of a real-time database and Google Input Tools to provide the area for users to write out their words and translate them into text. With caffeine and passion in our system, we implemented it in less than 16 hours!

Challenges we ran into

In our four members team, we were not extremely familiar with web development and its technologies, such as Google Firebase or Google Input Tools. There was a member who started the project who learned JavaScript the day of the project development and learned Firebase existed that same day. We all struggled in this aspect, and topics like a NoSQL database were extremely unfamiliar the use case we did use it in for multiplayer seems like to be the intended solution but an extremely effective solution. In addition, most of our time developing was looking at the documentation and being stuck on these new technologies but eventually pulling out of that stuckness. Lastly, the tracking website states that consistency between multiple users was the notoriously difficult issue, given data must be shared and interacted with every device connected to the game. However, looking back on it, we are proud to get through those challenges and developed a finished product to serve towards connectivity.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Before starting the project, we found web development to be a field to be quite intimidating to approach, given that most of our members' background was purely back-end development. Therefore being able to complete a fully front-end website in addition to adding Firebase, a technology no member used before, and use it in an unorthodox usage of a database, we're very proud to take that clever approach and also being curious about other fields of computing and challenging ourselves to exit our comfort-zones.

What we learned

We mainly learned from a technical perspective, front-end development, Firebase and NoSQL databases, and how they could be used in unintended ways to solve a unique problem, such as implementing a multiplayer handwriting racing website. Besides a technical perspective, we also learned how to work in a team and delegate towards an objective through communication and being transparent with each other towards working together. Lastly, we really enjoyed implementing the project, such as that spark of joy when solving a bug with your teammates or seeing projects gain massive progress when all hope seems lost. Aspects like that made us learn and remember why we went into the field in the first place.

What's next for WNR

Other than implementing the project, we really enjoy playing the website against each other to see who can come on top. It is quite a unique twist and is really fun to play or even practice writing on. Hopefully, we can expand on it in the future since it has the potential to grow.

Built With

• css
• firebase
• google-input-tools
• html
• javascript