Building a Cozy Sandbox Game on Harper

A desktop game focused on nature restoration was developed using a single Harper component to manage its entire backend, including the database, API, content seeder, and web host, allowing it to be shipped as a free, fully offline download on itch.io. The game offers a rich environment with six biomes and 150 animals, featuring a realistic food web where players gather resources, craft items, and restore habitats to encourage animal return. The backend is built using Harper, with its configuration streamlined through a concise YAML file, ensuring all game actions are processed server-side for consistency and security. The frontend leverages React and Vite for menus and Phaser 3 for the interactive world, with everything coded in TypeScript. The game logic, written as Harper resources, is designed to be portable, allowing the same codebase to run both online with Harper and offline with an in-memory store, maintaining the same game logic and data interface without network dependency. This approach demonstrates the efficiency of using a single component for development, eliminating the need for separate database and API provisioning, thus making it feasible for a solo developer to create and distribute a complex, server-validated game.

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