Stack to build a small game
Hello! As Theo says all the time. We are builders and the best way to get better is by building more stuff. I want to keep practicing building fullstack projects so I decided to create a small game, but I have a few questions if anyone can help:
I want the game to be pretty simple since I've done only two small fullstack projects (I only do FE at my job). The idea is to make a game for my friends to play (10 players give or take) in which you have a character with some stats like an RPG and you can decide to fight a couple of times a day. The fights auto resolve and you should be able to fight NPCs or other players. To avoid snowballing the fights would be somewhat random but with more chance to win the better your level / gear is.
My question is: How do you think I should approach this?
My plan is to use Next JS (for frontend and backend) with Typescript and Tailwind, Prisma with PostgreSQL. What do you think I should have in mind? I think this would be my first really somewhat big project so any help will be appreciated 🙂
If you want more details of how the game works let me know
4 Replies
If there is any push/listening aspect to your game make sure to research that in the t3 stack before your ready.
If it is more like a set up your position game then it auto resolves at the correct time you should be fine
I’d recommend using a game engine for games. T3 is powerful but really won’t flourish with traditional gamedev. It can be done, but it will give you a warped experience of both webdev and gamedev. If experimenting is your goal however, knock yourself out. I’ve built a number of games with web tech and it’s a fun learning experience. UI obviously works very well. But when you want to do stuff with animations, shaders, physics, then you’ll start feeling the friction and lack of helpful tools in your stack
If you want to do a full stack game, I see no issue with prisma and a typescript backend. But I’d swap out the frontend for at least a typescript compatible game engine for your frontend. React and nextjs seems not so helpful of a choice there.
i agree with all of this
people are doing some amazing stuff with react-three-fiber, but imo unless you really want to be in the browser there's better ways to get into gamedev
and yea, subscriptions/websockets is something you should research
- trpc subscriptions are still very much beta
- regular websockets won't work on vercel so you will need some sort of serverless workaround
Thanks for the replies 🙂
Maybe you remember those games like Bitefight or Ikariam where you basically don't have animations for combat, you only see the results so I don't plan on doing animations, maybe I can add some animations of like a two second fight that shows some feedback but the user won't be able to create or dictate the animations like in a real videogame, that's why I didn't think about real game dev tools.
In this case do you think it changes the fact or you still think that I shoud look into the game dev tools?