Show HN: JØKU – Web game I built if you fancy poker(playjoku.com)
playjoku.com
Show HN: JØKU – Web game I built if you fancy poker
https://playjoku.com
6 comments
Having just recently beaten the Gold stake on Balatro, this is right up my alley. I like that there are leaderboards so I can set goals for myself to attain. Will you come up with a mascot like Jimbo if you gain traction? How much Balatro did you play yourself?
hah, thanks a lot! not sure about a mascot, I like to keep the game simple for the moment. beaten the gold stake on black deck myself (my favorite), still working my way on other decks!
i was hooked and almost made it into the top 10. consider gamifying the ranking system. displaying a player's ranking and score compared to others at the end of each round, instead of requiring them to search for it, could be a really compelling feature. excellent work!
that's a cool idea. I'll definitely keep that in mind! thanks for playing
if you were to make it with Unity, would it have taken more of your time?
probably not, since I have a lot of experience building things with Unity. but dev time aside, it was really important for me to make the game as light as possible in terms of memory / battery usage. making this game with Unity would have been an overkill imo.
Continue reading if you are interested about my process.
I'm a recent dad with a full-time job, so those who are in the same position can relate that my free time is almost non-existent. I've had this idea for a game for some time, heavily inspired by playing Balatro. Even though I had made games with Unity before, I thought a lightweight web app was the way to go for this, but the thought of learning a whole new framework was overwhelming.
I was able to get the core idea of the game prototyped on a Sunday afternoon. This first prototype was built with pure JS/HTML/CSS, a single file that was 3k lines long. I showed the prototype to friends and family, and people were hooked! I had more ideas, though, so it was time to refactor the whole thing with a proper web framework.
It's been more or less a month since then, and I've been refining the game, adding features, and polishing it. It was a wild ride, to be honest, and I'm very happy with how it turned out. The current version uses React, Tailwind CSS for styling, Framer Motion for animations, and Firebase for leaderboard / analytics.
What's really cool is that, beyond actually finishing a project in my limited time, I learned a LOT about React and web tech in the process. I've started applying these skills in my full-time job as well, creating dashboards for the tools we are building.
Let me know what you think about the game if you get a chance to play, and ask me if you want to learn anything else about my journey. Cheers!