Cosmic Quest
A wellness game whose backend has to remember every step you took to reach the next planet.
- Context
- Backend coursework, individual
- My part
- Everything: schema, API, auth and the plain frontend
- Stack
- Node.js, Express, MySQL, JWT, bcrypt
- Year
- 2026
- What it is
- Complete real-life challenges, earn points and resources, unlock planets, build colonies, collect badges, climb a leaderboard. Progression is the product, so it lives in relational tables, not one flat record.
- What I did
- I designed the MySQL schema (users, challenges, completions, planets, colonies and badges with their join tables), split the Express API into routes, controllers, models and middleware, and added JWT auth with bcrypt, ownership checks and rate limiting.
- Result
- Multi-step actions like completing a challenge or upgrading a colony run as middleware chains that validate, reward and record in order, and constraints stop the same progression event from counting twice.
