About Idle Adventure

Idle Adventure was initially created as a project for my internet programming course at the University of Winnipeg in 2025. The project was to create a localhost server that could communicate with a browser, and store session data both in memory and a data base. Many people elected to submit chat rooms and other social media type applications. I however saw this project as an opportunity to create a fun game, and learn not just about the internet, but about complex data driven game mechanics.

I have always been interested in game development, and bringing a fun and elegant experience to users. To me, game logic is elegance and is far more than just code. The first thing I did was draw out how I wanted the game to work in my notebook. I still have ideas in there that I have yet to implement but many of the initial sketches were huge instruments in bringing the game to life.

Besides the front end application, and server elements that I followed along with in class, the first code I wrote for the game was movement. If this game was going to work the player needed to move. So I drew a map of the area, gave names and locations. Then I divided the map into "rooms". Rooms are the foundation of the game, they are the area a player is in at a given time. A player will hop from room to room via "connections" in order to traverse the world. Each room has items, npcs, or enemy functionality.

Adding multiplayer was actually really easy. Since I used a scalable data structure approach to building the characters and world, allowing multiple players to connect was as easy as making the server run asyncronously. For combat I just randomized the turn order for all the players in the room, and all of the enemies.

The game now is hosted for people to play, and I am still adding content here and there. The project was a lot of help learning Node.js and MongoDB, and since I built it without knowing about React or any other framework, I have greatly developed my javascript skills by accidentaly building a front end framework from scratch. This project has given me a appreciation and perspective on the value of frameworks. I am really proud of how the game turned out, and I hope you enjoy playing it as much as I enjoyed making it.