Finding Fiasco
A Where's Waldo-style game where players search for characters hidden in a large, detailed image. The game includes a timer to challenge players, score tracking to keep them engaged, and a variety of characters to find, making it a fun and interactive experience. The game is designed to be visually appealing and easy to play, with a focus on user engagement.
Intent of the Website
Finding Fiasco is a fun, interactive game that challenges players to find characters hidden in a large image. It is not meant to be a full-fledged game, but rather a showcase of my skills in building a game with a deployed front-end, back-end, and database.
Technical Overview
The website is built with React and Vite, providing a modern and fast development experience. Postgres is used for data storage, allowing for easy score tracking and character management. The game features a timer to challenge players and score tracking to keep them engaged. The large, detailed image is resized for smaller screens, ensuring a seamless experience on both desktop and mobile devices. Games are verified in the backend to ensure that players are not cheating by using the browser's developer tools to manipulate the game state. The game is designed to be visually appealing and easy to play, with a focus on user engagement.
Challenges Faced
The biggest challenge was creating a fair and engaging game experience, especially around verifying that players were not cheating by manipulating the game state in the browser. Early on in the implementation, a user was able to cheat the game, as API endpoints didn't verify that the user had an already existing game. Users were able to get negative scores this way. Implementing backend verification for scores and character finds required a more secure use of API endpoints. After moving all game logic to the backend, the negative scores stopped. Optimizing the large, detailed game image to work on mobile devices also presented a challenge. The image was too large for mobile users to look through, so a resized image was needed. The resized image would change the image coordinates and break the game, so two sets of correct coordinates were created depending on the image being used by the user. The variable coordinate answers allowed the game to be played on both desktop and mobile devices without issues.
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Want to Collaborate?
I'm always interested in new opportunities and collaborations. Check me out at one of the links below, or drop me a message and let's discuss how we can work together!