It’s kinda a tradition for me to use my Christmas holidays for a fun little project. Since Svelte became more and more a thing, so I wanted to do try it in practice myself. I also heard that SvelteKit is pretty popular in the community, so I decided to is as a framework. Because I already knew Vercel from previous side projects, I was very happy that it is supporting deploying SvelteKit projects. Vercel is awesome, because you don’t have to care too much about publishing web apps. I just had to put my code on GitHub and connect it to Vercel. Each time when I push to the main branch, a new version will also be deployed automatically. Vercel also allows me to use my own sub-domain, so I could use skip-it.lgk.io. I also created my game as a Progressive Web App (PWA), what makes it look and behave like an installable app, it even works offline!
You can see it on the sub-domain, I later called my project “Skip it!” and it is a card game you can play anywhere. On your phone, on your computer and on your tablet. If you know the card game “Skip-Bo”, you could probably guess, how you can play my game. I chose to create a clone of Skip-Bo because I sometimes play it with my family and also enjoyed playing the iPad app a while ago. Through the iPad app I found out how addicting and fun the game can be and the game-play might be simple enough to create it with my skills in web technologies.
The developer experience using SvelteKit and Svelte was awesome! For years I primarily use React for my projects. I actually felt a little nostalgic, because I wrote actual HTML again, instead of JSX (no more className) and handling states is way more straightforward. I also use Svelte’s feature for scoped stylesheets. In previous projects I normally use SCSS and create global stylesheets. In Skip it! I switched to component-scoped architecture. Benefit is, you automatically just keep CSS, you will actually use, because the code-editor will underline unused CSS rules.
Right now you can play against 3 players. I also thought about if you could play against real players. There are multiple ways to realise such realtime actions. Maybe I will implement it next holidays. 😅