The beginnings of Bobswitch

Posted by on February 24th, 2014 in coffeescript javascript python

Recently I decided to build an online multiplayer version of the backpackers card game switch. Switch is similar to a lot of other card games like Uno and crazy eights, just played with the rules I know. It can be played with multiple people and like most card games is mainly down to luck once everyone knows the rules. But it is a good project to use in order to play with some new technologies. I knew I wanted to use websockets and I wanted to try out AngularJS and Coffeescript so a turn based multiplayer card game seemed as good a choice as any. So far I have managed to get a very early version of the game up and running; this includes a lobby section where you enter rooms and the main game screen where upto four players can play a game of switch and talk to each other in the chat window.

Continuous Integration

I have been wanting to try out Travis-CI and Coveralls integration with Github for a while and having now made the Bobswitch Github repositories public means I can try them for free. This has the added benefit that I get to have badges on my Github repositories!

It turns out setting these two services up with Github is ridiculously easy, you just add a .travis.yml config file and then Travis-CI picks up every check-in and runs your tests for you reporting any failures.

Todo

There is still a lot of functionality to be fixed and added to truly make a stable version of Bobswitch though, just a small selection includes:

• Adding room persitence. Should save rooms into a database like MongoDB
• Allow logins through google. Will stop people stealing each others seats! Can also then get avatars next to peoples names, could use facebook or twitter instead *Fix little issues with connections and notifications
• Add rounds to knock out worst performers until only two players left