Today I launched my first project, a graph guessing game, where you have five minutes to guess as many graphs as possible. I was reworking my math skills last month before my physics degree began. The most joy I had was with guessing the graphs. Look for significant points and write down the math function describing the graph. I loved it so much that I thought why not make a game out of it? Like GeoGuessr for geography but for math nerds. So I started working on GraphGuessr. It took me about a day to make a working demo. From that point onwards, I added authentication and a leaderboard that shows the player with the most points. Done was my MVP.

At the heart of the game is the Desmos' Graphing Engine with great support for panning and zooming. I tried GeoGebra, Function-Plot, and JSXGraph but in the end, Desmos' Engine was the most fun to use for my project and the easiest to integrate.

After a week, I started to get near a point where I had a product I could launch and continue to build in public. You can guess different graphs (nothing fancy), make an account with a unique username, and have a global leaderboard to see how good you are. The closer I got to the launch the more nervous I got. What if people think this is a bad game, think it is too easy, or worse hack me because I didn't know what I was doing and exposed something that shouldn't be exposed? I'm not an experienced developer so all that is nerve-racking (...please spare me). Nevertheless, not launching my game was not an option. I want people to use it and see if they like it.

I think it is important to take leaps forward and take a plunge in the cold water if you want to improve. That way you get feedback early on, and I think that will save you tremendous time in the long run. For the longest time, I would never risk anything and do my things on my own. But I want to change that. I decided to start a blog and build in public and do some cool stuff along the way. Even if they are not perfect and sometimes a little rusty.

So, still quite nervous, I'm very excited to share my game with you. Let's see who the king of the graph-guessing community is. If you like the game it would mean the world to me if you could share it and give me some feedback and wishes for some cool features and updates you want to see.

Til next time,
Jaro.waytoofancy