Senior Assassins

Alex Yang and Yaseen Halabi

Overview

• This is a simple, clean full-stack web application to facilitate Senior Assassins, an irl last man standing game.
• A demo is live at https://seniorassassins.netlify.app/.
• The static frontend interacts with our Node.js backend server through API calls to modify database values.

Motivation

Previously, our highschool had used manual methods, marking changes in the game state by hand, but we thought that it would be much simpler to have a computer do all the heavy lifting.

Game rules

• Each round, each player is assigned a target to kill (1 shot with a nerf gun).
• You may get kills by killing your target, or killing your assassin.
• After killing your target, you're assigned their target.
• If your target is killed in self-defense by their target, you're assined their target.
• Most kills wins $250. Last person standing wins $250.
• Hermit rule: If your target kills their target, but you don't get any kills by the end of the round, you're considered inactive and are eliminated.

Process

Although we had learned to code programs to do tasks locally, we hadn't worked with web applications before. After a few days of research, we decided to implement a RESTful API using javascript on both frontend and backend, as well as use MongoDB for cloud data storage. We used the ReactJS, Node.js, Express.js, and Mongoose framework/libraries, as well as HTML and CSS. From there, we started with the basics— storing players, and steadily built up capabilities from there. We managed to implement

• full round automation
• email notifications
• kill submissions
• new player signup
• a clean UI
• a dynamic leaderboard
• hidden admin controls