Once more, into the breach. My other project has been put “on hold”, which is to say that it’s source has been squirreled away safely and I am now moving on to something else. Something similar, mind you, but something else entirely.

Way back when I was elbow-deep into a web-based version of my perennial attempt to create that interstellar commerce game I took a quick day-trip to talk about React and a Nodejs-based game server called Colyseus (still don’t know how to pronounce that). That post had been 100% theoretical as I was in the middle of making good progress with my C# MVC and SignalR implementation and didn’t want to take the time to learn React and get deeper into Node than I had gotten when coding my first Discord bot.

But slow and steady and all that, and here I am, with several months worth of React learning under my belt, and having successfully deployed a product-ready app at work having used the technology. And once again the pendulum swings back to my desire to get this goddamn game out of my skull, so why not revisit React, Colyseus, and Node now that I have more experience than I did when I wrote my theorycrafting post?

Friends, I’m here to tell you that the legends are real. All of ’em. I have a basic, working…eh…client and server test using React and Colyseus. Over the next few posts I’m going to completely derail myself with Ye Olde Scopique’s Project Curse and go through the rudimentary implementation of how I got to this point of absolutely nowhere in the hopes that it helps someone who comes looking for similar information. There’s not a lot about getting Colyseus working with React from a “what the hell am I looking at, exactly?” perspective, and dammit, I intended to be that perspective.