GalaxyTraders is a space trading game modeled after Alien Assault Traders, and uses Meteor/NodeJS, Bootstrap, MongoDB, and related tools. Browse the GitHub repository for more technical details.
In GalaxyTraders, you take the role of ambitious merchant captain of your space-faring vessel, seeking out lucrative trade routes, smuggling contraband, upgrading your ship, and transporting colonists, all while dodging Imperial interdiction, pirate attacks, and your well-armed competitors. Ultimately, you may found and defend colonies, and form a powerful Trade Association with your friends to realize your dreams of galactic domination.
This is a solo project that I started for a couple of reasons. As a professional software engineer, I wanted to learn current JavaScript tools and frameworks. After some experience with Angular and Cordova on the front end, Meteor jumped out at me as both a technically intriguing platform to learn while writing a full-stack NodeJS app that is responsive and enjoyable.
I played Alien Assault Traders for years. It is a fork of two earlier PHP codebases, Black Nova Traders and Nova Gaming System, in turn inspired by the popular BBS game TradeWars, which itself was inspired by the 1974 BASIC-language game Star Trader. These are essentially GalaxyTrader's cultural roots, a set of concepts with over 40 years of history behind them.
Around 2007, I developed a set of PHP and JS tools and a set of Greasemonkey user scripts to help me collect and analyze data from AAT games. I started my most recent foray into JS by reviving those tools as a Chrome extension early in 2016, but I quickly noticed that the game software wasn't being actively updated or maintained, relied on numerous long-deprecated PHP 4 functions, won't run unmodified on up-to-date LAMP installs, and does not render correctly in today's mobile browsers. While I contributed a couple of patches to the project, I wasn't interested in inheriting another legacy codebase for a game with a shrinking community of players.
I'm dating myself here, but as a teenager, I played BBS door games. (Yes, with a landline modem.) I also enjoyed Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which was purportedly the inspiration fo Star Trader. I even played a snail mail game that simulated space armada combat. Arguably, this is all some hipster nonsense, since I'm basically telling you that I was into space gaming before it was cool. "You kids turn your infernal FPS down and get off my lawn!", I'm shouting at you, while waving my cane, which decidedly does not have the LTEs or the Wi-Fis. Or I'm just forever fascinated with and nostalgic for this one very specific form of gaming.