#game-development

Articles tagged with #game-development

Building Hangman in React — Word Bank, Letter State Machine, and Wrong-Guess Reveal Animation
How a Set<string> tracks guesses, a 6-stage SVG gallows reveals wrong answers, and physical keyboard events wire into the same guess callback as on-screen buttons.
May 6, 20266 min read1
Building Whack-a-Mole in React — Recursive setTimeout Spawning, Per-Hole Timers, and Speed Progression
Why the spawn loop uses recursive setTimeout instead of setInterval, how each hole gets its own timer ref, and how elapsed time drives both spawn rate and max concurrent moles
Apr 28, 20266 min read1
Building Hangman in React — SVG Progressive Drawing, Word Categories, and Physical Keyboard Events
How to render 7 progressively revealed SVG elements, derive game state from a single guessed Set, and sync physical keyboard input with an on-screen keyboard
Apr 28, 20267 min read1
Building Wordle in React — Date-Seeded Daily Puzzle, Two-Pass Duplicate Letter Scoring, and localStorage Streak
Three non-obvious implementation problems: seeded RNG for the daily word, correct duplicate letter evaluation, and keyboard state that never downgrades
Apr 27, 20268 min read1
Building 2048 in React — Tile Merge Logic, Direction Rotation, and localStorage Best Score
How a single `slideRow` function powers all four directions using grid rotation, and why the implementation fits in under 350 lines
Apr 27, 20267 min read2
Building Snake in React — Canvas RAF Loop, Mutable Refs to Avoid Stale Closures, and Wall Wrap
How to build a smooth 60fps Snake game in React without stale closures — all game state in refs, timestamp-based speed control, and touch swipe support
Apr 10, 20265 min read1