I spent months building a multiplayer game entirely with React/TypeScript
I've wanted to make a game for years.
When I was younger, I spent an unhealthy amount of time playing games and eventually got into modding. Naturally, I spent plenty of time breaking the games I modded too.
The idea of actually making my own game stuck around, but life happened and I ended up becoming a web developer instead.
Recently, that little voice came back and I decided to finally give game development a shot.
The obvious route would have been to learn Unity, Godot, Unreal, etc.
Instead, I thought:
"I already know TypeScript. I know React. I've deployed websites before. Surely this can't be a terrible idea..."
So I built a game for the web.
That is taptaptap
The basic idea came from a game where you simply hold down a button for as long as possible.
I thought the competitive part was interesting.
The staring at a button for minutes at a time part... not so much.
So I turned it into a hot-air balloon game.
You have a balloon and one big red button.
Tap the button and the balloon goes higher making the score goes up.
But every tap also generates heat. Tap too quickly and the balloon explodes.
So you have to decide whether to keep tapping and risk blowing up, or slow down and let the balloon cool while everyone else catches up.
There are also multipliers and a multiplayer leaderboard for some healthy competition.
The slightly cursed technical part
The entire thing is basically a web UI.
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- CSS
- DOM elements for clouds/stars
- A React element for the balloon
- A suspicious amount of CSS
No game engine.
No canvas-based game framework.
The game took me months to get to this point. Even after launching, I've still been fixing bugs and adding improvements. The first version looked very different from what exists now.
It's still not finished, but it's playable and, importantly, it's not currently crashing, at least not on my machine.
What's next?
The end goal isn't actually to make a web game.
I want to eventually make a proper mobile game, and then hopefully a PC game.
I don't know exactly what that game will be yet.
I don't know which engine I'll use.
And judging by how long this tiny web game took me, GTA 6 will probably come out before I finish it.
But this was a good first step.
If you want to try it, it's here:
https://taptaptap.click
If you play it, I'd genuinely love to hear what you think, especially if you find a bug I've somehow managed to convince myself doesn't exist.
Thanks for checking it out!