Note: This project was created in a bubble, during the 2020 stay at home order, as a personal challenge. The base game was chosen because of its permissive license, allowing to easily bring in content to fill in the gameplay code. It is not affiliated, endorsed, nor approved by Cards Against Humanity. In turn, this project does not endorse Cards Against Humanity's content or behavior outside of the game.

This repository contains a month-long fever-induced stream of conciousness projected into a typescript codebase I like to call "Cards Away From Humanity". It is an online multiplayer version of Cards Against Humanity playable on your phone/computer, and over video chat.

I initially planned for this project to be a slightly bigger scope, sadly things happened towards the end of development that led to be eventually ramping down progress and turning off features enough to call it a day (See the scopeChange branch).

The game is playable at https://cafh.herokuapp.com/ - It's hosted on a free instance, so it may take up to a minute to load the first time if it's sleeping. Once it's running, you can invite friends and play!

Use as a framework

The server code is designed to be reused for other game types. Simply provide your own class implementing the Game protocol, and the rest of the codebase will handle player authentication, room management, horizontal scaling, and more. See CAFHGame.ts for a messy yet surprisingly functional implementation of this game's logic.

Deploying

This repository is built to be deployed on Heroku, with a heroku-redis addon to handle multiple servers. It's set up to be deployed from Github, so simply clone this repo and deploy it onto an instance with redis.

Dev notes

• The client is built with Vue, in Typescript and Sass. The backend is built in Typescript. They communicate through Socket.io, and servers scale horizontally by talking through Redis.

• Putting client and server in the same repo was a terrible idea, I knew it was, I still did it, and it became a pretty big pain point during deployment. Originally I planned one repo but two separate deplyment pipelines (one client, one server) which kinda made sense for performance reasons although I decided to just not worry about that since this is only a temporary side project.

• Typescript ended up being a bit of an issue with vue, as I did not plan for vuex to cause as many as any casts. Since my goal was to go fast and the store itself is very small I skipped rewriting a strongly-typed store which would probably have been a good idea.

• Originally, this repo was designed to run on Google Cloud Engine; but it turned out that websocket connection became extremely unreliable when scaling beyond a single instance. I switched to Heroku pretty late in the process, which means that I had to account for the deployment differences such as not being able to deploy from the server folder. That's why there is a weird package.json in the root.

• Safari is surprisingly buggy, especially when testing. Lots of messages are being dropped which would probably require some more state redundency to make the game more reliable. I think it has to do with it going into energy saving mode when not focused (which happens a lot when I test things).

• I'm not convinced redis was the best choice. In the end, I'm very glad I picked it because I was able to do a deep dive into how it works and the design decisions behind it. However, knowing I was gonna deploy on a cloud platform I should have considered using their built-in pubsub system. Ramping down the project actually meant I never got to implement features where redis would have shined.

• This is not the form I intended this project or this repo to be released in. But hey, isn't the point of this game to be unexpected? And innevitably disapointed when things don't go your way?

License

MIT

Photo Credits

Photo by David Švihovec on Unsplash