Show HN: Varcade Games – A sandbox product for engineers to learn and play in

Hi all,

I wanted to share a little project I've been working on before/after work throughout Covid lockdown.

It's a 'sandbox' project for intermediate coders (or a playground for the more experienced).

A software project that is an actual real world production ready project, exactly like what you'd work on when you get your first engineering job. That means it includes things like build scripts, deployment configurations, metrics and graphs, logging etc...

The goal here is to give new engineers and environment to learn real world software engineering, without the pressure and expectations of the real world job. ie. an apprenticeship.

Once you've learned to code a bit you will need to see how to apply it on a real project. How to take bits of code that solve specific problems and turn that into a working product that you can iterate on, build and deploy easily.

The whole thing is open source and available here: https://github.com/Code-Over-Time/varcade_games

The project itself is meant to be simple to pick up and work with, but complex enough to showcase real world engineering challenges. I've also left some bugs in there as well as some code in need of a refactor for people to practice on.

There is a dev server where you can see the running project here: https://varcade-games.com (you can sign up with any valid looking email - in fact I'd recommend using a fake email just to sign up, I don't have verification set up there - multiplayer works too if you want to try it out, but there's no crazy latency compensation or anything and it's hosted in Europe, but should be playable for most). This is all deployed with Kubernetes - though its a small deployment so probably won't handle too much load.

There is also a site I will be launching with a lot of support material: https://codeovertime.com/ - currently that is invite only early access, but if you're interested I will set up and account for you and we can chat in the forum. There is a free course there that will help you set it up - including setting up Linux on Windows and Docker: https://codeovertime.com/meetup/vcg1_project_setup/

Some of the tech included here:

* Javascript: Vue.js, Phaser 3, node.js, Websockets

* Python: Flask, Django

* Redis

* MySql

* Docker

* Makefiles

Pretty standard modern tech stack stuff.

Would love to hear people's feedback on this and if you want to get involved I can created you a free account before they become paid (will limit this to a small number of users).

(*edit: formatting)