Introduction

Hi all,

Looking to design and develop this fun paper game from my childhood in digital with elixir, phoenix (channels, presence), and possibly LiveView with the members of this community.

I already have a working one with angular+socketio+python so this is a good learning curve with the elixir community.

Here is the game, rules, and a sample round of me trying to explain how the game works. This game might exist online already under different names for different cultures. I didn’t investigate.

Rules and Play

rules963×1195 150 KB

Design

I aim to follow the design principles that are demonstrated and explained brilliantly in this article as much as possible

Aspirations (intentionally left vague)

• Hoping for store nothing approach
• If things need to be stored somewhere, prefer eviction and memory based storage.
• things should keep a tidy house at all times within their scope.

Behaviours

Player

Scenario: New user identification success
Given I am an anonymous user
  and I visit the Game Server 
  and I am required to enter my name
When I enter "nickname"
Then the "nickname" is accepted

Scenario: New user identification, nickname non UTF-8 encoding
Given I am an anonymous user
  and I visit the Game Server 
  and I am required to enter my name
When I enter "0xC0, 0xC1, 0xF5, 0xF6, 0xF7, 0xF8, 0xF9, 0xFA, 0xFB, 0xFC, 0xFD, 0xFE, 0xFF"
Then the "0xC0, 0xC1, 0xF5, 0xF6, 0xF7, 0xF8, 0xF9, 0xFA, 0xFB, 0xFC, 0xFD, 0xFE, 0xFF" is rejected

Scenario: New user identification, nickname too long
Given I am an anonymous user
  and I visit the Game Server 
  and I am required to enter my name
When I enter "nickname longer than 20 characters"
Then the "nickname longer than 20 characters" is rejected

I will slowly expand the following Rooms, Gathering Hall, and Server as scenarios in time.

Rooms

• Can be created
• Should have a string identifying the name
• Should have a string language identifying the language used in the room.
• Should have an identifier of being private or public
• Minimum 3 players needed to start a round and play the game.
• Able to know which players are in the room
• There is no maximum player limit to a room but should investigate for performance reasons.
• Can be joined only, if it hasn’t reached maximum user count and no active round is in play
• Can initiate a new round by the ‘administrator’ if there are more than 2 players in the room.
• Can be destroyed by the creator or administrator
• Can be destroyed only if there is no active round
• Players should be able to chat with each other outside of an active round
• Should do self-cleaning where possible

Round

• Can be initiated by 'administrator
• All the players should receive the first question at the roughly same time
• After answering a question, player should be presented with the next one.
• If a player finishes all their questions, they simply wait for all players to finish.
• If the player count has fallen below the minimum players at any instance, the round should be abandoned
• Should be able to identify which players have answered the current/past questions
• Should have a maximum time set to end the round if it does not end by player interaction.
• Round finishes when all the questions are answered by all the players`
• Round should be able to display the stories on each player’s screen upon finishing.
• Chat should be activated when a round has finishes regardless of reason
• Should do self-cleaning where possible

Gathering Hall

• Should list all the public rooms that are available to join
• Should include name, language, player count of each room
• Should be able to filter by language
• Should be able to sort by player count
• Should do self-cleaning where possible

Community

I want this to be a community effort where people can peer-review each other’s code and approach and we can all learn from each other in a fun small project.

Repositories

Elixir Library - GitHub - ykurtbas/elixir-www: Elixir library for the online multiplayer game WhoWhatWhere · GitHub

Phoenix UI - GitHub - ykurtbas/phoenix-www: The phoenix application for WhoWhatWhere game · GitHub

More Questions?

I didn’t take any further design restrictions and decisions.

I probably missed a couple of important points, either on purpose - not to dictate the design or genuinely forgot. Please ask away!

Please let me know what you think or ideas for implementation, developing together.

Review

Please have a look at the commits to check if I am on the right path, specifically where to mutate the players in the room.