About

The Story

A little bit about how it all started.

The story begins in the fall of 2024. After a vacation where my friends and I played the board game 'Battle for Rokugan', I wanted to play it online with them. Unfortunately (or not), I couldn't find a service or platform to do that.

"But I'm a developer, I'll do it myself. 20 Minutes Adventure." - That what I thought. But as it turned out, frontend development of e-commerce on Magento2 has little in common with game and gaming platform development.

The adventure took a bit longer, but in September 2026, the project was launched. At the moment, it is possible to play an online version of 'Battle for Rokugan' with other players or add bots.

There are certain daily limits (creating 1 game per day), this is due to the fact that the project is non-commercial and the infrastructure uses free or minimal tariff plans on various platforms (Supabase, Resend, Vercel).

The Tech

Technical details of the project and what is under the hood.

Architecture

Initially, the project was built on a modular system, but as the project grew, there was still a certain 'creative chaos' and confusion about what belongs where. Later, I've discovered FSD and managed to organize and clean-up part of the project. Unfortunately, I found out about FSD at the final stage of the project's development, so the architecture became 'according to' FSD rather than being built on these principles from the beginning. There are still certain difficulties with 'Which feature does this belong to?' or 'Is this in shared or maybe in entities?', especially in the gaming part.

Framework

The app backbone is NextJS + App Router. The project started with version 14 and is now on 16.* with Cache Components and Partial Prefetching. All code is typed, I won't lie, there are some @ts-ignore but each has a TODO :)

Frontend

Frontend is built with React + TypeScript. Styling is done using SCSS modules. MUI 7 is used with custom styles and components. Forms are handled by Tanstack React Form, with validation on both client and server sides using Zod. Some forms are protected by Cloudflare Turnstile. Most components have previews.

State Management

On the client side, Zustand is used. There are main stores: app, platform, and game. Stores are divided into slices. On the server side - Server Actions from NextJS. Usually it goes this way: UI => Server Action => Supabase RPC => Supabase Realtime => UI Watcher updates Zustand slice.

i18n

Several localizations are available: Русский, English. The data is stored in two places - .json dictionaries and a database. The necessary dictionaries are loaded depending on the locale and area - in the game its own, on the platform its own, etc.

a11y

Pages are semantically marked up correctly, and ARIA attributes are used minimally. I use the built-in Accessibility Tree, Lighthouse, and Axe DevTools for testing.

Testing

The project uses Playwright E2E testing. Testing covers individual features - changing locale, login, etc., as well as user scenarios - navigating through pages, creating a game room. The test for the entire gaming process is still in progress.

Database

Users auth/registr, data about games and game rooms, realtime as well as a lot of other information about the platform - all this is stored and processed in Supabase. For convenience and security, I had to practice writing RPC and RLS. Great service, thanks for having it.

2026 and no AI, no way! Since I was the only one dev, the entire project in its current form is possible thanks to AI. For example, the commentators in the game. ChatGPT wrote phrases for each commentator depending on the style of the clan. I read them and selected the appropriate ones. The lines were generated on 11labs and also selected. The pictures for the commentators were also drawn by ChatGPT. With Copilot's autocomplete in the IDE, the speed of writing code has also increased significantly.

The Future

Project vision, support, and new horizons.

For me, this is a very interesting part, to be honest, because initially the plan was a simple platform to play online with friends, but it has grown a bit and now I somehow want to add more games (and improve/fix/make responsive what is already there).

First in the list for addition: Johnny Bigood - a quiz (the code for it is lying in the repository, it just needs to be finished). Pigs (Royal Bluff) - a card game. Chests - also a card game from childhood.

That's the plan, but how it will be - the future and financial situation will show. Let's hope for the best.

The Stars

Those who made the project shine.

Despite the fact that from a technical point of view the project has one developer, in fact, without these people the creation of the project simply would not have made sense. I would like to thank them for their contribution!

First of all - my wife. She supported and believed in me, even when I was feeling down and there was no “light at the end of the tunnel”. Thank you, darling! ❤️

My friends, who stoically endured all the debugging during the game and were the real beta testers. I know how tired you were of hearing: “Oh, just one minute, I'll fix it now”. Thank you for enduring!