On building a multiplayer Reversi game

About half a year ago, I made a personality quiz game called What Salt Are You from scratch and since then, almost 100,000 people have taken it–something I’ve been super grateful about.

People told me that they really enjoyed it and there’s even a Reddit thread where people shared which salt personality they were. I loved seeing people talking and connecting over something small even if it’s momentary, which is why I thought I’d do it again while I’m still on my career break and not drowning in corporate yet.

This time I’m building a multiplayer game called Endless Reversi¹ in SvelteKit with Socket.io and I’m gonna be documenting the process and learnings along the way after being inspired by Juraj Majerik’s Rides project. It will be a standard Reversi game with the additional rule of an infinite game board and a bid-to-play system. There will only be one game running at any time and users with credits will be able to play, but anyone can react with to express how they feel about the ongoing game and moves.

I plan to discuss the following topics of the project in my subsequent posts, not in that order:

• Implementing realtime gameplay with WebSockets
• Wrangling state management, game logic and optimistic UI
• Implementing the bidding system
• Endless Reversi board and the challenges and complications that come with the Endless aspect
• Rendering the board (I want a more visually pleasing page so I’m finally putting my three.js journey course purchase to good use)
• Implementing reaction buttons (post MVP)

It’ll be my first time building something of this scale from scratch and I’m really excited. Stay tuned :-)

Footnotes

1. I wanted to call it Othello at first until I realised that it’s a trademarked word, oh well ↩