🌱 Context
While working on my Spider Solitaire game in React (play it here 🕷️🎮), I had an idea for the “arcade menu”: representing a dynamic spider web 🕸️ where a spider moves around and eats insects 🐛. Each insect would represent a game level.
The goal was to create a living, interactive menu instead of a simple static level list.
🔍 The Discovery
While looking for a way to simulate this, I stumbled upon this project: subprotocol.com/system/spider.html.
It was exactly what I had in mind 🤯!
But after checking the GitHub repo, I quickly noticed some issues:
- The last update was in 2013 (almost 12 years ago!)
- The code is interesting but not compatible with modern JavaScript syntax
- No integration with React or TypeScript
🛠️ The Decision
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I decided to fork the Verlet.js project and:
- Update the codebase to modern JavaScript
- Add TypeScript support
- Create a React wrapper so React developers can easily integrate Verlet.js into their projects
📦 The Project Today
👉 GitHub repo: https://github.com/Franklin-hyriol/verletjs
👉 Available on npm:
npm install verlet-react verlet-engine
🚀 You can try it out right now!
⚠️ For now, this is version 1.0:
- No new features have been added yet
- It’s simply the original library updated with TypeScript and React support
📚 Documentation is still in progress, so not fully available yet — but it’s coming soon!
🔮 Next Steps
Planned improvements include:
- Adding more objects
- Collision handling
- Gravity
- Wind and other physics interactions
- And much more…
🤝 Contributions
All contributions are welcome 🙌
Whether it’s adding new features, improving the code, or helping with docs, feel free to open an issue or a PR.
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