polemos

Polemos is a text based battle simulator. With a group of friends we used to play BrantSteele's Hunger Games Simulator with our own custom characters, each of us representing a couple of teams. But as we did we found we wanted to play with more than the characters the simulator allowed us to, so I decided to make my own version of it, giving us the ability to add as many characters as we wanted, as well as our own custom events, scenarios, statuses and add ourselves as sponsors of each of the teams.

We also wanted to keep track of the results of each of the games, so I added overall stats for each of the characters, keeping track of those with most wins, kills, deaths, etc. The project includes the create teams, players, events, scenarios, statuses and sponsors. As well as the ability to run a simulation with a custom number of teams and players. As the simulation runs you can see the events that are happening and the status of each of the players, this creates a "Story" that is shown day by day and is saved on the server so it can be viewed later.

The project is live and hosted on polemos.aornum.xyz and can be accessed by anyone on guest mode, where all data is removed and replaced with defaults every 24 hours.

The frontend of the project was built using SvelteKit, since this project required multiple different pages, I decided to use SvelteKit to take advantage of the routing and server side rendering. The backend was built in Node.js using Express and Typescript. The database used was Sqlite. This was my first time using a SSR framework and I really enjoyed it. At first I struggled with the having code run both on the server and the client but once I got the hang of it I found it to be a great way to build websites. I think I didn't use it to it's full potential since I didn't really use things like cookies yet that allowed me to render different pages depending on the user and did the user dependent rendering on the client side, but I still found it to be a great experience. For the backend initially I planned to use another language and framework (Rust and Rocket) but I decided to go with Node.js since I was more familiar with it, and wanted to do things like image compression for multiple image formats which I found to be easier to do in Node.js.

This was my first time using a SSR framework and I really enjoyed it, file based routing was also a new thing to me and I found it to be a great way to organize the project. Also learned more about SvelteKit, with things like layouts and how to use them to create a consistent look across the website. I continued to learn about making mobile friendly websites, Polemos being fully usable on mobile devices. <br> I also learned the importance of planning ahead, specially when it comes to the domain model. I had to change the database multiple times, at first I made the mistake of making the players depend on the teams, which meant that stat tracking was a lot harder to do. But I learned from that and made sure to plan ahead on other entities.

The main thing I would do different, where I to do this project again, cookies for authentication, meaning I can render most if not all of the pages on the server side. I would take more advantage of SvelteKit's endpoints, making the client completely unaware of the backend server.