Building the Realtime User Experience

Chapter 10. Putting It All Together

We’ve built a number of small applications that demonstrate a single aspect of the type of experiences that can be had on the realtime web. In this chapter we’ll take the different technologies that we’ve started using and build a much larger, complete application.

In this chapter we’ll build a game specifically designed to utilize many of the types of features that we’ve built. In the previous chapters, these features were designed to be applied to an already existing application. This chapter will explore an application that has these features integrated at a much deeper level as part of the core functionality of the application.

The Game

The game that we’ll build in this chapter is a location-aware game designed to be played with a modern phone that supports geolocation JavaScript API calls. Like other location-based games, the purpose of this game is to encourage users to travel around their city and check in using a mobile phone. In this case, we’re building a game called iPandemic, in which a user “coughs” to infect a new location rather than checking in and announcing her presence. If she turns up in a place where another user has already infected, this is considered a challenge, and both users have to take action within a set period of time or risk losing points and having their germs die off. Once a “germ” has infected a location, it will continue to grow until it reaches an enemy germ. When the two germs meet up, ...