I
built a little role-playing game in React Native. I tried to build the type of
game I like playing, with quests and interactions with non-playing characters,
while learning some mobile UI programming tricks. These are some of the main points that I took
away:
- The initial setup was a bit involved, probably because I'm not used to develop JavaScript applications. Getting the right code to properly do the plumbing between React, Redux, React Navigation, tests, etc. was a bit of a hassle. Obviously this has to be done once and then you can concentrate on writing the functional code. As I noted recently, then upgrading to newer versions of your dependencies can be a hassle!
- I was happy with my declarative approach to the game world. I don't think it would be manageable to do otherwise. I define as JavaScript structures the world itself: the different places and how they communicate, the items they contain, etc., the non-playing characters and the possible interactions you can have with them, items and their characteristics, monsters and spells. This gives me an immutable representation of the start world, and the state of an actual game just has to store the modifications from that initial state
- This of course could mean that I (or somebody else) could reuse the game mechanics for a totally different adventure!
- I of course used of Redux to manage state. The state is only modified by Redux reducers, so everything the player does in the UI just becomes actions, not explicit state management operations. I combine several reducers, each reducer being responsible for modifying one section of the global state, which makes each reducer simpler, but fragment the code. For example when the player takes an item from a room, one reducer adds the item to the inventory, another removes the item from the room, so maybe there's some potential for bugs there
- I found the integration between React and Redux easy to use: you simply define the mapping between the state and components properties, and between component interactions and Redux actions.
- I abused a little bit Redux to implement combat: combat holds a kind a mini state for each fighting round, and then the result of a fighting round both is represented in the UI ("the rats bite you for 2 damage"), and impacts the global world.
- I didn't spend too much time on the UI, just using basic React Native components. I found some of the layout hard to do correctly, and styling components is not intuitive when you're not a CSS expert. Maybe I should take a CSS/Design course, because you can tell from my UI designs that I'm a programmer :-)
- All in all, writing in modern JavaScript was nicer than expected, even though I think using a stronger typed language would be better. If I had to do another similar project I would probably try to use Typescript. I liked especially the object spreads to update parts of structures and the use of consts.
- I used Expo to test on a tablet, I didn't try to actually generate a final application outside of Expo, I haven't looked at all on how to distribute the game as an app.
All in all, if was an enjoyable experience, but of course designing a full game instead of just a prologue you can do in 5 minutes would be a different type of endeavor...
