To play the game

Game Link

Steps to play the game

1. After clicking the game link you will see something like this

Small blue circles are Level 1 Loons and the big black circles are Level 2 Loons which spawn 10% of the time. These loons are following the path of the sine wave.

2. Click on the canvas to place the turret.

Level 1 turrets are red in color. Level 1 turrets will start targeting the Level 1 loons with green laser. They won't shoot the Level 2 Loons.

3. Upgrading turret to Level 2 which will target the Level 2 Loons

If you click once on the Level 1 turret i.e. the red square, the turret will get upgraded to Level 2 and change its color to blue. This Level 2 turret will now target the Level 2 Loon

To build and run loons-frontend

cd loons-frontend

npm install

npm run dev

To build and run loons-backend

cd loons-backend

npm install

npx rollup -c; node .\output\index.js

Discuss potential bugs or exploits with either the game mechanics or the RPC interface. How can we make it more robust? How would you improve the overall architecture?

Potential bugs

1. In my current implementation, the loons after getting created are not deleted after they exit the canvas. Because of this, the turrets keep targeting them.

2. There is an integrity issue between the front end and back end, some loons might be seen getting stuck on the canvas.

Increasing Robustness

1. Adding validations on the backend to check if the loons getting popped on the frontend are getting deleted on the backend storage.

2. One more thing, if we try to open multiple tabs, the loons get stuck in the previously opened tabs, but the turrets are working fine. This is because the state mapping for the loons is shared. One way to solve this is to create new state mapping everytime data is getting pulled from the websocket.

Improving Architecture

1. Making the back end secure. Currently, there are no security measures implemented and gamers will easily be able to find ways to hack into the system.

2. Adding validations on the back end to validate the state of the loons getting popped on the front end.

• Setting up a reconciliation mechanism to solve the integrity issue mentioned above. We can do this in a couple of ways.
  • From the Back end: Sending deletion message along with the patching message from the back end to the front end, so that the loons getting popped on the front end will be erased from back end.
  • From the Front end: Another way is for the front end to maintain a separate set that stores all the ids of the popped loons. When the loons get fetched from the back end, if the ids from the set are present in the map from back end, these ids will be filtered out.

3. Adding authentication for the players so that their game data will be saved.

4. Making the game multiplayer

5. Adding a scoring mechanism so that the players can see their global score.