Attempt at Creating a Clone of Adventure Capitalist

After about 3 weeks working on this project, I'm kind of done. Built with React/Node/Redis/SocketIO I learned a lot. The reason I say I'm kind of finished is because unless I overhaul the whole backend of the code, I don't think I can get it working 100%. ... I know it looks awful haha.

The project was fun and challenging, there weren't any guidelines on how the project should be built aside from it being written in Javascript/Typescript. I initially tried using Typescript, but it gave me headaches with the difference in import exporting. This is something I'll probably need to learn more about.

You can check out a version of a working game here (not mine). The hardest part about creating this clone is regarding hiring a manager. Hiring a manager takes care of clicking for one of these shops. The number on the right shows the "cooldown" of the button before it can be pressed again. A manager will auto this process so whenever the shop is off cooldown, it should be clicked, the timer is actually reflects how much cooldown time is left, there should also be a progress bar providing a visual representation.

There were 2 issues to think about:

1. The initial max cooldown of the Lemonade shop is 500ms, when a player purchases a certain amount of the shop, the max cooldown is actually halved or and it becomes exponential with each threshold reached. So potentially this shop could be firing a request every 7.8ms (500 / 64), what tool should I use for this?
2. How should I manage the auto clicking by managers?
3. The managed shops should also be running even if the window isn't open, players should be informed of how much cash they have earned while the window was closed

I looked around a bit and decided to use websockets, specifically Socket.IO. I thought using the traditional HTTP/GET request would destroy the backend since there could be a ton of requests being sent.

The second issue I kept thinking of was how to create the auto function for managing a shop + keeping track of how much time was left AND having all this be reflected on the front-end. After thinking about this for a few days and getting nowhere, I reached out to @humphd who suggested using the TTL(time to live) + Pub/Sub functionalities of Redis. This was pretty cool as it had me researching about keyspace notifications for Redis. That's all for now... I may blog more about this later.