Overview of Gigalooted

This is a fun hobby project I made as a companion for the game DMZ; which requires players to keep track of a lot of information - loot locations, keys, mission items, stash upgrades, and more. With so much to juggle mentally while trying to survive against enemy players, I wanted to create a tool to help reduce the mental load. This led to the creation of Gigalooted, a client-side loot tracking app for DMZ.

Why Build Gigalooted?

In DMZ, you take on the role of a soldier collecting loot in a war zone. You unlock secret areas with found keys, complete missions for rewards, battle other players, and can buy items in the shop. Some powerful gear can only be acquired by trading specific looted items. With different recipes to remember for various equipment, keys to bring on raids, and mission objectives, it becomes a major mental strain to keep it all in your head.

Gigalooted provides a centralized place to track everything you need for DMZ raids. I built it to allow players to focus on surviving and completing objectives rather than trying to memorize a laundry list of required items. The goal was a fast, easy to use loot tracker that wouldn't require waiting on server responses.

How Gigalooted Works

Gigalooted is built using Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS on the front end. It leverages local storage to persist data between sessions and page reloads. This allows you to close the app or reload without losing your tracked items.

The app is hosted through Next.js server side rendering, which generates static HTML pages stored on a global content delivery network. This provides low latency and snappy response times for users anywhere in the world.

State management is handled through React context API for straightforward control over components re-rendering when state changes.

With no backend other than Next.js, Gigalooted provides a fast client-side experience perfect for quickly accessing your DMZ raid info.

The end result is a loot tracker that removes the mental overload from DMZ and allows you to focus on the action. By building Gigalooted as a client-only app using Next.js and React, I was able to create a tool that meets the needs of DMZ players in a lightweight package.