Introducing Neno - Part 1

Neno

I'll be sharing my progress in building Neno, an online word guessing game. This is going to be my entry for the Hasura x Hashnode Hackathon and my first ever Hackathon entry.

A little story 📖

I was reminiscing with my little sister about our childhood and all the fun we had. Life was fun and we had little to no worries.

We talked about all the games we played as kids and she showed me modern versions of Snake Xenia and Bounce which we used to play on my Nokia 3310.

Playing those games evoked so much nostalgia it made me feel I should revisit all of our childhood games.

That's why I decided to bring one of my favourite childhood games into life. We didn't really have a name for it that's why I struggled finding a name for this project 😂

I ended up naming it "Neno" which translates to "Word" in the Swahili language.

Neno is a modernised online version of this game. It's played in groups, minimum of 2 and maximum of 8.

Players are assigned a letter and each member is required to come up with 3 words that start with the letter.

There's a timer and the fastest player to guess all the words correctly wins the round.

Game Modes

Solo 🙌🏿

• Good for practice
• Test your guessing skills against a timer and see how many words you can guess in 3 minutes

Tournament 🏆

• The player with the lowest score is eliminated in each round.
• The last remaining player wins the game.

Initial steps

Tech setup 👨🏿‍💻

• I created a new Hasura project and connected to a Heroku hosted PostgreSQL instance.
• I then created a public Github Repository for the project.
• Pick a tech stack for the project (GraphQL Apollo, Next.js, Chakra UI and xState).

Brain storming 🧠

I had a brain storming session where I decided

• The game will be online and will have public/private rooms (max 8 players).
• The game will have a grade school/early 2000s with a modernised touch kind of aesthetic.
• The game will have a chat room where players could chat before and after a game has ended.
• Search for game assets that'll match the desired aesthetic.

Next Steps 💡

• Highlight different game components.
• Project setup process on Hasura and Github.
• Code structure an organisation.
• Tech plan for the project.

Let's connect 🤙🏿

I'm active on Twitter, Github and also Hashnode!