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Adventure capitalist

Click to earn game clone

http://46.101.171.160:3000/ (valid until August 1st 2020)

Game Screen Managers screen

Overview

  • Buy and upgrade businesses. There should be several business types to choose from.
  • Make money from a business. (i.e. you click on a business and in a certain amount of time you get money - see web implementation above.)
  • Hire managers, so that money is made automatically.
  • When you close the game, next time you open it, you should see the money that your businesses made for you. (Businesses continue to make progress while you’re away.)

Detailed Requirements

[requirement](/docs/Game Closure Coding Challenge_ Adventure Capitalist.pdf)

Development Process

1. Research

By inspecting source game found out few pieces of information

  1. game not sending network requests on action

    • reference game not sending request if I leave idle
    • not sending network request even if I buy the business

  2. probably reference game using the unity web Not sure about recent unity Web build but reference game's indexedDB key name is /idbfs/PlayerPrefs. And its unity's default PLayerPrefab saving location.

  3. reference game saves data every 30 seconds

  4. if I change the browser tab without closing the reference game tab, the timer stops

  5. reference game doing user identification at the client level if I clear cache and relead my data clears and game start fresh

  6. some interesting console.logs

    If I leave the game and comes back this console.log can be viewed. It seems the game is recalculating idle earned money on game start

    Time elapsed since going offline: [13.5520000457764]

webgl.js:1 Profit surge on [lemon] for time [13.5520000457764]     results in the venture completing [361] times, earning [253422]

webgl.js:1 Profit surge on [news] for time [13.5520000457764]     results in the venture completing [18] times, earning [259200]

  7. Business prices and profits are increasing linearly. Based on the donut shop price and profit after a few minutes of checking, I found that price and profits are increasing linearly.

    count price profit
    1 103,680.00 51,840.00
    2 116,121.60 103.680.00
    3 130,056.19 155,520.00
    4 145,662.94 207,360.00
    5 163,142.49 259,200.00

    price_profit_increase

Decisions

These are some of the decisions I made during development

Functions

  • Not to implement tutorial

    There is no reason to omit tutorial except limited time. If I release this POC to real users, I have to implement a tutorial right away. For now, I assume reviewers and contributors are aware of the requirement. Then I am not implementing a tutorial.

    pros:

    • simple logic
    • less development time

    cons:

    • game is not understandable to first-time users

  • Not to implement user login

    Like a reference game, I am saving user ID locally. Since I assume I can trust local data during POC, there is no need to have a login procedure.

    pros:

    • user can access the game without login step.

    cons:

    • Users can't use multiple devices.
    • user can lose data if they clear cache

  • Not to implement special manager functionality

    The reference game has some special managers who increase profits by 10%. In this POC I am only including managers who run a business

    pros:

    • game logic would be simple

    cons:

    • game functionalities would be few

Technology

Unity and Construct 2 are out of option. Because JS is required to be used. (Actually, Unity has JS option. But I don't think that is the point of requirement) Mostly due to the limited time, I am using the technical stacks I am familiar with. In production, the game should not be created with HTML/CSS. Because their frame rate is very low. It has been almost 3 years since last I wrote an HTML5 game. I am not sure wheter old HTML5 framework I had used (MelonJS) is still usable.

  • Using Create React App for frontend

    If we create games on HTML, SSR is not for games. So CRA is the most straight forward way to create a single-page app. VueJS is an another alternative. But I have limited experience with VueJS.

  • Using Ant Design for Component Library

    In a limited time, not reinventing the wheel is an important part. Some functionalities like Layout, Button will save some time with the cost of game-like UI/UX. But when I choose HTML as frontend I left game-like UI/UX out.

  • I have a few boilerplates. But not using them because

    • some stacks are old
    • some things are overcomplex for this simple app

  • To use graphql

    I am not expecting much loads. Since it is POC, I am going to try and update APIs a lot. A simple graphql server is an excellent choice for this case. This decision bring Apollo as frontend client.

  • Using Nexus + Prisma for backend

    Because I have some experience with these technologies and they are very easy to up and run graphql server.

  • Using MySQL as a database

    • on POC I don't need a Cloud database.
    • prisma 2 only supports SQLite and MySQL ( for now )

  • phpMyAdmin

    Its just a database check tool. Anything would be OK.

Maintenance

  • No to use a load-balancer

    POC not expecting heavy load. So load-balancer is excluded

  • Not to save a log.

    The game is for POC purpose. So I am not doing whole maintenance development. Also not to use createdAt, updatedAt, deletedAt on database records. Because they are mostly used for debugging

  • No alerts

    Since this game is for POC purpose, I am not implementing monitoring and alert

  • No tests

    The game is small. And I am not going to maintain it long term

Service debts

There are a lots of ideas to improve this product. Some of the concerns I have:

  • Implementation of reference game functionalities

    • User Profile / Status
    • Bulk buy company
    • AdVentures
    • Upgrades
    • Investers
    • Special managers
    • Animations

  • Need to improve game balance

    Currently, all business prices and profits are not finalized, and buying "Lemon Business" is more productive. Need to improve numbers in the future

  • Sound

    • BGM
    • Effect

Technical debts

All engineering projects have technical debts. Most of them are intentional but not fixed. Because it requires resources to fix them.

  • Encrypt frontend data and request

    Currently, frontend data is saved to localstorage without encryption

  • Better user recognition

    Need to use token-based auth like jwt

  • Duplicated code

    Both back and front end contain a lot of duplicate codes. Leaving them duplicated mostly due to time factor.

  • Backend refactoring

    Due to simplicity, I implemented all Query/Mutation in single file schema.js. If I implement more actions or decide to move to long term maintenance, I have to restructure backend folders

  • Minimize network requests

    In limited time, My implementation was to send a network request every time the user/manager does action. It is a very bad implementation. I need to implement something similar to the reference game. For example summarizing money at the frontend with encryption. Sending data to backend every 30 seconds.

  • Make docker image smaller

    Currently, I am running the docker process as ts-node. Need to change it to node. After that also need to build the image with npm install --production

  • Things needed to be implement

    • register/login
    • save data button
    • transfer fund
    • ...

Contribution

Endpoints are hardcoded for docker deployment. Change them to localhost for development

# MySQL and phpMyAdmin
docker-compose up -d
# new terminal
cd backend;
npm install;
npm run dev
# new terminal
cd web;
npm install;
npm start
# new terminal
cd backend
npm run migrate-save
npm run migrate-up
npm run seed

Now we can access

Deployment

  1. clone the repository to your server

  2. start containers

    docker-compose -f docker-compose_prod.yaml up -d

  3. connect to game_backend container

    docker ps
docker exec -it <container_id> bash

  4. prepare migration files

    npm run migrate-save

  5. migrate the database

    npm run migrate-up

  6. insert initial businesses

    npm run seed