Intro

Hello readers 👋

Today I'm introducing HoltsOfSurvival, a RTS game where you play as a chief, build and maintain your Village to grow.

I was working on this project for last 10-15 days for the Planetscale Hackathon, But seems like my project idea was pretty big to complete under 15 days as I had to work alone and do everything from creating assets for the game, to program the game mechanics, still I tried my best to make it to a point that can show the potential of the project. Hope you like it.

Tech Stack ⚙️

• Godot :

  Godot provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel. Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license.

I chose Godot as the game engine for this project, as I heard it is very begginer friendly and very powerful for 2D games. And indeed it is, I had to learn Godot on the go while working on the project and I find it pretty friendly and also it uses a pretty easy to understand in-house language called GDScript which is very similar to python. Obviously having some basic concepts of making games earlier helped me alot.

• Blender :

  Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software toolset used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D-printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and, formerly, video games.

I used Blender mainly to create the assets for the game.

• Node & Express : To build the backend server

• Planetscale : as Database for storing the players authentication data and game data.

• Prisma : as it makes working with databases pretty easy.

• WS : to keep the connection to the client state full and fast.

• Heroku : for the server deployment

• Netlify : for serving the static game build

Others : JWT, bcrypt, uuid, cors etc.

Building Process

Game Server

The game server is a nodejs express server that handles player authentication, authorization and upgrades to websocket connection when player requests for it.

• Authentication is done by basic username/password method ; when a new user signed up the server creates a user record with the unique username and hashed password. Also a player record is added to the player table with initial game values.

• Authorization is done by JWT; when a player is successfully logged in they were provided a JWT access token. this access token is later comes handy while upgrading to websocket connection and making query to the database.

• Websocket connection is requested by player just after they get the access token from server.

  • when the socket connection is established the server sends a message to the client requesting the access token to authorize the player.
  • When the player is authorized the server query player data from database and sends to the player to initialize the game instance.
  • websocket connection then starts listening for update requests from player and update new data to the database

source-code

Game

These are the main pieces that makes the game

• Grid based Snapping system
• Building system
  • moveable
  • upgradeable over time
  • generate resource over time
  • Collecting resource and storing
• User Interface
• Updating game state to server : right now whenever the game updates states to the server, server writes new player states directly to the main database(PlanetScale ) but in future I'm thinking of adding redis for write-through caching.

source-code

I'll Be writing a series called learn-godot-together covering the building process of this game.

Role of PlanetScale

While making the server for the game, PlanetScale as a database really helped me or I should say amazed me, to be specific the PlanetScale branching feature that allows two types of database branches: development and production.

The development branch provides an isolated copy of my main production database schema, where I was able to make changes without breaking anything to the production and when I felt satisfied with my schema changes, I can easily open a deploy request from the UI itself. Also PlanetScale analyzes the schema changes for conflicts to ensures changes can be deployed safely without impacting production.

Challanges 🎯

Coming up with a good idea:

Even though I was pretty sure about making a game for this hackathon coming up with a good game idea took me more than a week.

Making the assets:

creating assets for the games is pretty time consuming as well as hard if you don't have experience in drawing or 3D modelling.

And that is why I chose a pretty basic art style for the game and modeled the assets in 3D and renderd out using blender.

Time Constraint:

this time the limited time constraint was the main challenge, as I had to complete this huge idea in a very short time period.

Future Plans 🔮

Some features that I'm unable to complete during the hackathon but I'll be pushing, soon I finish working on them

• add leaderboard
• visiting other player's Village
• add redis for caching and realtime read/writes.

Important links 🔗

Keep in mind that the file size for the game is little high (~14MB) so it might take long time to load if your connection is slow

Demo: holtsofsurvival.netlify.app

GitHub: nathgoutam93/hashnode_pscale_hackathon