I wanted to learn websockets, and I also wanted to play with HTML Canvas. At the time I recently learned of board game called “A fake artist goes to New York”. Its similar to pictionary. I built an online version of this using websockets. I used Redwood js for managing the non-realtime aspects of the app, and the stood up a seperate node app on heroku for the websockets. For the drawing part, I started with Canvas, but ended up changing to svgs for they were easier to update each of the players paths. I eventually figured out a way to do it with canvas, but the svg implementation worked well enough.
I learned how to use websockets, and you to manage multiple “rooms” and clients. I also learned how to use simple State machines for controlling the phases of the game. I learned how to draw using both svg, and canvas. I got experience with the Redwood framework and prismadb.