Game Box

This is a fun little web application built using the React framework that presents the user with a rough/limited mock-up of an Aqua-style OS X environment and three mini-games. This project became a bit of a runaway train for me. It originally started as only one game, Reaction Time Test. I decided to make the main test button have an Aqua-style appearance, and it really snowballed from there. I realized I needed to come up with a design for the rest of the application. So, why not keep the theme going?

Once I had designed the Reaction Time Test app to fully look like an Aqua-style OS X window, it seemed only fitting to put a static, non-interactive menubar above it. Once I had done that, I figured I might as well make it functional. And, of course, I might as well build out window dragging functionality. And, rightfully so, window resizing functionality. And how could I forget window-layering functionality! And then functional traffic light buttons for the title bars. And desktop icons. Who could forget those? And then surely this all needs a dock! How else could a user re-open a closed window? The horror!

At this point, I felt silly just leaving this all as-is with only one "application", so I built two more "mini-applications" that had been kicking around in my head, Speed Clicker, which is very derivative of Reaction Time Test, and Off The Wall, a very simple ball game. To top it all off, I figured a System Preferences application was needed. Afterall, I had to give a user some way to update their username and/or password. And I couldn't leave the System Preferences application with only one settings pane, so I built a pane for time settings and another for desktop wallpaper settings.

I really enjoyed working through the logic involved in the functionality of this application as well as designing it to imitate the famous Aqua UI appearance and some very limited functionality of early OS X versions.

Check out the web app here: https://game-box.app/

Explore the code base here: https://github.com/ZachSteinberg-webdev/game-box