Quiz game

A multiplayer quiz game about the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals, where every answer is a number between 0 and 100.

About the project

Know-it Showdown is a browser-based quiz game that tests how much you know about the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Instead of multiple choice, every question has a numeric answer between 0 and 100, so players have to estimate rather than guess between options, and the closest answer wins. Anyone can create a game and share a code with friends, or join an existing game, without needing an account. It was built it with JavaScript, HTML and CSS to make learning about global issues a bit more fun and competitive, as a part of a agile software development course at Chalmers University of Technology.

Challenges and solutions

The hardest part was managing the game state and keeping it in sync between players over WebSockets. Every player needs to see the same question, timer and scores at the same time, and things like players joining mid-game, answering at different speeds or disconnecting could easily make the state drift apart. I solved this by letting the server own the game state and treating it as the single source of truth: players send their actions to the server, the server updates the state, and then broadcasts the new state to everyone in the game. This made the game much more predictable and easier to debug.

What I learned

I learned how real-time applications work with WebSockets, and how important it is to have a clear structure for state when several clients depend on the same data. I also got better at thinking about edge cases, like what should happen when someone leaves or reconnects, and at designing a game flow that feels smooth for the player.