Developing local gaming platform

[bdekk]

Hello everyone. I am new to this forum so first of all, hello everyone! I have been working on a new local gaming platform this weekend and would like your feedback. I would be happy with technical input but also with input about the idea or what you would like to see to use this platform.

The idea of this platform is that people can use their mobile phone to control the player in their game which is being displayed on a computer monitor or a television. In the current state, the project is still not stable but the basics work.

I implemented up until now: two library files (xentha-server.js and xentha-client.js) which respectively represent the server and client library files, an API server which accepts API request (to register games or users) and socket connections from clients and a game socket. The API forwards data from and to the client and game socket. For example, client input to the game socket and layout definitions to be presented to the client. For now I used socket io to implement the socket connections, although I am not yet satisfied with the performance, I will see if I can replace this later on. As an example I took a game from the phaserJS examples: Invaders, and altered it a little bit to work with sockets, this still needs more work and contains singleplayer code, like: scores. Next to that, the code is not yet very well written. It still needs some improvement on the structure and redundancy of code.

 

Current functionality

Client library:

- receive server commands: roomJoined, playerLeft, playerJoined

- send input to server

 

Server library (to add to your game):

- Receive player input

- Define client layout and send to clients (buttons, text)

- createRoom, joinRoom, playerJoined, playerLeft

- Receive client input

- Audio Manager (play, pause)

Website:

- Profile

- Register games.

 

Ideas to work on

Server library:

- Custom achievements 

 

Website:

- Lobby

- Leaderboards

 

Client

-Custom HTML layout definitions

 

All code can be found on github: https://github.com/bdekk/xentha

 

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

 

If you would be interested to help me improve it, let me know or create a pull request.

 

Kind regards,

Bram

[bdekk]

Pushed a small update yesterday. Sound is now also supported. I am now working on example games

[bdekk]

I haven't given an update on this project for some time. I worked on it these past few weeks. I am still building a first example game but next to that I started working on a website to show all games and register games if they are using the API. The basic functionality works now. I am still working on some features (the ToDo's can be found here: https://trello.com/b/8gTCaTkN/xentha. Some of the most important ToDo's: create example game, add documentation, make the application accessible through xentha.com, refactor client code. I will give another update when I added most of the documentation and you guys can try it out . If you have any remarks about the idea, feel free to share!

[jkohler]

@bdekk i skimmed through your github code, wow it's quite impressive! good luck, and keep us posted!

[bdekk]

@jkohler thank you for checking it out. I am now working on a rewrite of the socket connection using a plain websockets implementation instead of socket.io to improve performance. Next to that I created a basic quiz game (https://github.com/bdekk/xentha/tree/master/api/public/quiz). Stay tuned! :).  

[jkohler]

liked your post bdekk. rooting for you too

[bdekk]

It has been way too long since I gave you guys an update on this project. I was focusing on other projects and did not have the time to progress with this one. Luckily I found some time last week to work on it. I changed the course of this project a bit since last time I wrote my plans for this project. The current state of the project is the following: I built a website which functions as a "browser console" which shows a list of games to choose from. Next to that I build a controller website which functions as a controller to let the user control the site (pretty much like an xbox dashboard where you use the physical controller to choose the games) this idea is that players open this site on their phone. If a game is chosen, the game is loaded into an iframe in the "browser console" site and the controller gets a command from the server to load the "client-side" of the game into the controller. This makes the games fully independent from the site and controller. I hope that this explanation makes some sense, to clarify I will post a small video showing the functionality tomorrow :). The basic functionality is almost in place. To do is player login, achievements and set up on a server. If you would like to take a look at the code, you can find it here: http://github.com/bdekk/xentha (the code still needs some refactoring). If you would like to talk about this project with me, find me on the phaser slack of just drop me a line here.