Final project for Software Engineering Languages and Tools (SELT). A large, team-built multiplayer adventure game (Grid Quest) developed in Ruby on Rails, with a strong focus on Agile software development, sprint-based delivery, and collaborative teamwork across the full stack.
Project background
This was a substantial course project designed to mirror real-world product development. Our team followed Agile principles: we broke work into sprints, held regular standups and retrospectives, and prioritized features in a backlog. The scope—multiplayer worlds, quests, mini-games, social features, and integrations—required clear ownership, coordination, and constant communication. Learning to ship incrementally, integrate code from multiple contributors, and balance technical debt with new features was as important as the tech stack itself.
What we built
Shards of the Grid is a web-based, grid-based multiplayer game where players explore worlds, complete AI-generated quests, play mini-games like Blackjack, manage inventory and shops, and interact with friends via real-time chat. The stack includes Ruby on Rails 7, PostgreSQL, background jobs with GoodJob, and integrations with OpenAI for quest generation and SendGrid for email. Testing used RSpec and Cucumber; we used RuboCop for style and SimpleCov for coverage. Building this end-to-end as a team reinforced how Agile and teamwork scale when the codebase and feature set grow.
Demo
Gallery
Source
GitHub: NikHerdt/projectdirectory-selt_2024_team_002 (SELT 2024 – Team 002)