swordbattle.io

For the judges:

My idea

I remember a few years ago I was just getting into programming and I was decently good at scratch. I had an idea for a scratch game called sword.io which was basically 2 people 1v1ing with swords. I made the game and it was probably one of my best scratch games.

Anyway when I saw that Kajam was going to start. I wanted to make an actual online multiplayer version of this game. I was going to use kaboom.js for it.

Process

I started with the kaboom template. At first it looked confusing, but I eventually figured it out. I didn’t really like the implementation of multiplayer in the template (was annoying to work with like it cleared everything when someone joined), so I quickly botched together a socket.io server with everything I needed. At this point, I had some problems with kaboom, like dynamic resizing didn’t work, hitboxes couldn’t be calculated correctly, and rotate doesn’t work with area collider. I made the very sad decision to switch to another game library. I settled on phaser and that worked much better for me, (even though docs were really annoying sometime)

Learning

This was my first ever multiplayer game, I had no clue how this stuff works. This article really helped me to deal with smooth movement and client side prediction. I learned a lot about lerp, sin and cos, and how collisions are calculated. I also learned about Authoritative Servers and Dumb Clients, so it is hard to make hacks for my game.

Conclusion

Overall, this was an amazing journey for me, thanks Replit Team, for creating this amazing opportunity to learn and do something you love… <3