My journey of creating Tambola
Hi folks, I’m writing this blog to let you know about how did I come up with an idea to create Tambola — a game as my side project.
Why Only Tambola? 🙇♂️
As I love travelling, I often spend my vacations with my family. On every vacation, one standard game which we all play is Tambola. So we always have it in our vacation checklist. As we always have a physical game with us, it involves one member from us to call for random numbers, and other participants will take part in the game. In this way, the caller will have to call the numbers without participating in the game, which seems to be a bit unfair for the caller to sit and call out for numbers while others enjoy it playing. Also adding to it, carrying Tambola wherever we go was a big problem for us too.
— That’s where I just recognised a real problem.
I started thinking around solving this problem using something which I love & enjoy. Suddenly an idea to create an online version of Tambola came up to my mind. This is how the journey of building Tambola was started. I added this to the list of my side projects.
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I always try to work on such kind of projects by considering them as a side project, because they have some excellent advantages:
- It allows me to learn & explore new skills with lower risks.
- It boosts up my motivation & mental health by providing a different environment from our daily routine work.
- It helps me to keep myself involved and allows me to work on something the way I want it to be.
All about Tambola 🕹
By chance, it all happened during the time of COVID-19 🦠 pandemic was started. As all of us were in a lockdown, I found it to be a perfect time to launch the game so that all can play the game from anywhere easily on their fingertips. It also helped me in spending my boring time during lockdown into something productive.
I tried searching the web for something similar to what I was trying to achieve. I found a couple of similar games online. I noticed that the one thing which is common in all of them was a bad UI/UX (User Interface/Experience).
In my opinion, if a product can’t deliver a good UI/UX, then product loses 70% — 80% of its credibility. Tambola is a game which people of all age groups play. So keeping that in mind, my main aim was to deliver a good enough UI/UX so that everyone should find it easy to understand & play.
Developing Tambola 🛠
As I was clear about my idea, I started by listing down some of the major points which I want to achieve as a result to it.
- Want to build the whole game using a serverless architecture as that will help me to learn & focus my time over the game development rather than maintaining the servers.
- I wanted this game to have one of the best UI/UX anywhere on the internet.
- I wanted users to start playing the game in just 1–3 clicks.
- I wanted to finish this product in a month.
As I wanted this game to have a top-notch UI/UX in just a month, I involved my brother in it as he is a UI/UX guy.
Tech Stack 🔌
- React (Gatsby) — Frontend (Progressive Web App)
- Node JS (Backend) — Server-side functionality using firebase cloud functions
- Pusher (Socket) — For realtime interactions
- Firebase’s Firestore — As a flexible & scalable database.
Response/Feedback ✍️
After completing the project, I posted it to ProductHunt so that I can share it with others and can know what they feel about it. In a day we got ~380 upvotes from around the world and got pretty good feedback.
Also please let me know in the comments, how you feel about it. I would love to hear from you too 🙂
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