Groschat

A multiplayer real time game to play with your friends, answer the question about one your friend. The answers are collected, the player whose answer is chosen by the maximum people wins the round.

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Inspiration

The inspiration to build this came after playing endless hours of ludo, with my friends I wanted to do something better and also after watching Salvatore Sanfilippo's talk on redis streams, pumped us to do something interesting

Groschat: A realtime multiplayer game

What it does

This lockdown has been long for all of us, all of us have yearned to meet our friends and family. Groschat is a fun game you can play with your friends, answer questions about each other. So the game begins when a Sandy gets bored and decides to come to Groschat , he or she creates a new and waits for players to join, Eurus joins, Harry joins, Rohan joins

Once everyone has joined Sandy decides the game length and starts the game.

All the user's are shown the question, "What superpower does Rohan wish he/she had?"

  • Sandy answers "Running fast like flash", and waits for Eurus, Harry, and Rohan
  • Eurus Answers "Psychic powers to read anybody's mind", and waits for Rohan and Harry
  • Rohan Answers "Flying like Iron Man", and waits for Harry
  • Harry Answers "He is fine the way he is"

The game collects all answers and every one is show all the answers except their own answer, (you can't choose the answer you wrote)

Rohan is shown all the answers in a jumbled order

  1. Psychic powers to read anybody's mind
  2. He is fine the way he is
  3. Running fast like flash

Rohan chooses the third answer, "Running fast like flash" and waits for others to answer

Harry also chooses, "Running fast like flash",waits

Eurus chooses "Flying like Iron Man", waits

Sandy chooses "He is fine the way he is"

The collects all the chosen answers and tells every one whose answer did they choose and who who choose their answer?

In this Round Eurus chose Rohan's answer and her answer Psychic powers to read anybody's mind was not chosen by anybody. So she gets the following message from the game.

You choose Rohan's answer

Your answer was chose by none

Then all the players are shown the scorecard for this round, Sandy is in the lead

Sandy 2
Rohan 1
Harry 1
Eurus 0

All the players click on ready and wait for everyone to be ready.

After all of the players are ready the game shows the next question

After 5, 7, 10 rounds the game is over and all the players are shown their scores and the game comes to and end.

How we built it

This game was built using MongoDB, React, Redux, Express, Node and Redis Streams and Data Structures.

MongoDB: This is used to store user info, and questions in the game, addtionally it stores data about the previous games

Node: NodeJS works as backend of the application the players communicate to the Redis streams by the means of POST Requests.

React: React is used for the frontend of the application where the user interacts with the game.Redux is used for state management of the game. Material UI's design system is also used to power the frontend.

Express: Acts as a middleware. Proper MVC architecture is followed while designing the backend.

Redis Streams: They are used for in game communication, every game uses a total of 4 streams

Challenges we ran into

React & Redux challenges

While making the frontend like setting up theming and components using Material UI, Then there was the challenge of updation state with each event in the redux store

Node challenges

Setting up express and using middleware for custom error handling,

Redis challenges

Setting up redis for was chalenge to start working we have to setup redis-server and the redis-cli, which came up as a challenge for someone who hasn't used redis before, as well as hosting it online. Then came the challenges of setting up the full stack application. We use lists, hashes and sorted sets along with streams to enable communication between different parties

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make a decent enough gaming application for our friends and family to play.

What we learned

  1. Using JWT authentication in NodeJs
  2. Implementing Model-View-Controller pattern in backend
  3. Setting MongoDB Atlas
  4. Defining Complex Schema's in MongoDb
  5. How to setup a full stack application using the MERN stack
  6. How to Deploy a web app
  7. Setting up Redis on our machines
  8. Using Redis Streams
  9. Communication using different streams
  10. Using Lists in Redis
  11. Using Sorted Sets in Redis
  12. Using Hashes in Redis
  13. Using Redis on the NodeJS backend
  14. Setting up Redis Enterprise Edition

What's next for Groschat

We plan to use RediSearch for searching of users and questions. We may also use RedisGraph to connect friends request, we also plan to provide each user his/her own unique bar code for each game he creates. We also plan to make mobile app for our future using React Native

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