Territorywars

JcVollar

Territory Snake — A real-time multiplayer territory-capture game inspired by Splix.io. Carve out land on a 500×500 grid, defend your turf, and outmaneuver up to 80 AI bots and other players. Built with a Node.js + WebSocket server and a Svelte/Vite client, packaged with Docker.

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Territory Wars

I got into computers through gaming, and have always loved spending time playing games. I started programming by building small text games with Windows .bat files in the early 90s. After a while I figured out that a game needs a lot of work — sound, graphics, and so on — things I'm just not good at. But I always come back to building small games like this one when I'm bored. And with the web knowledge I have, I really enjoy creating these little online games.

Territory Wars is a real-time multiplayer territory-capture game in the spirit of Splix.io. Carve out land on a 500×500 grid, defend your turf, and outmaneuver other players and AI bots.

Splash screen

Gameplay

How it's built

Server — Node.js with the ws WebSocket library. Authoritative game loop runs at ~22 ticks/sec, broadcasts delta updates of changed cells only, and manages up to 80 bots with their own AI (vision, danger, and chase ranges).
Client — Svelte 4 + Vite. Renders the grid to a canvas and talks to the server over a WebSocket.
Packaging — Multi-stage Dockerfile builds the Svelte client, then bundles it with the Node server. The server serves both the static client files and the WebSocket on port 3099.

The whole game is configurable from a single file: server/config.js — grid size, tick rate, bot count, AI tuning, etc.

Running it

With Docker (recommended)

docker compose up -d --build

Then open http://localhost:3099.

To stop:

docker compose down

Locally (for development)

You'll need Node.js 20+.

# Terminal 1 — server
cd server
npm install
npm run dev

# Terminal 2 — client
cd client
npm install
npm run dev

The Vite dev server will print a local URL for the client. The server listens on port 3099.

TODO

Balance server load vs. bot count. Need to figure out how many bots we can run at once relative to the number of human players without degrading tick rate. Right now BOT_COUNT is a static value in server/config.js — it should probably scale dynamically based on connected players and server headroom.
Investigate the "unknown bot" bug. If the server runs for more than ~24 hours, an unidentified bot starts showing up in the game. Restarting the Docker container fixes it, but the root cause is unknown. Likely a state leak somewhere in the bot manager or player ID allocation.

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