Hello there,

I recently discovered the game TANX (if you don't know it, check it out, it is really fun) and i really liked the format of the game. Like the more popular game Agar.io you simply visit a website and start playing which, I think, works very well for casual games. It has an extremely low barrier to entry as you don't need to download or install it first.

In fact, i find this concept so interesting that I want to try to create a small game like this myself and start to experiment with the new technology. I am fairly new to the whole web development thing, so I first had to figure out how the development workflow in such an environment works. As the programming language I choose TypeScript over JavaScript because all the additional code completion makes life a lot easier and the Visual Studio Code editor has excellent support for it. However, this means that there is an additional compilation step before you can run the game in the browser. At first this was extremely frustrating, but after I familiarised me with some tools like webpack and started using them the workflow became a real breeze. In my current setup I can immediately see the result of the changes I made while coding. This enables extremely fast iteration cycles and lets me test many different things really fast.

So for now, I spent most of my time setting up my development environment and creating a small framework for the game. However, I also started programming the server using Node.js. This was very straight forward and even without any experience it didn't took me long to get some basic communication going. Here is a short video of the current state:

Everything is very basic right now, just a sample model I found on OpenGameArt and a simple untextured terrain generated with perlin noise. However, I still wanted to document the process, mostly for myself to look back to but maybe some of you find interesting as well. For the next step I want to add some animations. See you then!