CodeCombat | Devpost

Inspiration

Our love for programming and our competitive spirits inspired us to change how we sharpen our programming and problem-solving skills, creating a more engaging and entertaining experience!

What it does

CodeCombat is a web-based competitive programming game with 2 game modes: Unranked: players are matched up with a random opponent and the match results do not affect their ranking. Competitive: the player is matched up with another player with a similar rank and will affect the player's ranking.

Players compete to solve a programming problem concurrently. The scores are calculated not only based on how much is taken but also on how efficient the code they have written is.

How we built it

CodeCombat is built primarily in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Our question web scrapper which pulls questions of sites like leetcode.com is written in python. Our content database is then generated, sorted, and stored using Dropbase and their great API.

Challenges we ran into

The most prominent challenge we ran into was that the API that we originally depended on for our browser-based IDE seemed to have been inconveniently taken down during the development of our product. This cost a lot of time and caused cascading errors. We had to drop a few features in order to implement a different API to accomplish the same task, but in the end, we are still very proud of what we came up with.

What we learned & Accomplishments that we are proud of

On a higher level, this project was also a great learning experience as far as remote work and project management across multiple timezones. Learning to distribute our process with these limitations was a great learning experience and it was amazing to see our product evolve over the constant work cycle. While half the team slept, the other worked due to the time difference, allowing us to maximize our working time.

As far as programming goes, working with APIs was new to most of us and we gladly were able to integrate an online IDE to our website!

What's next for CodeCombat

We are working on more features and cleaning up some of the unpolished parts of the UI. We will be working on other game modes in addition to insights during the match and beginner tutorials for those new to programing. Moreover, it is possible to have a second edition of CodeCombat that targets younger age groups to engage them early on with the language of future- Coding.