Retro Week

Initial UUID based code
First attempt
Final Iteration
Network analysis

PR 1 - Party Popper

Party popper is a multiplayer game where everyone joins different lobbies via a code. Similar to lobby code in popular games like among us.

https://github.com/LucasLobo/Party-Popper/pull/56 Fix random genrated invite code

Current state of affairs

In the current build of the game, the lobby code is a UUID which is 128 bit long with numbers, letters, and symbols. Sending such a long code requires the player to copy and send it via some application and is prone to mistakes while typing it in.

The improvement

In this PR the code generation for lobbies was revamped to have very short 6 letter codes which can easily be sent even through voice calls making joining of lobbies extremely easy.

Challenges we ran into

When we design code for lobbies the most important aspect is to avoid generating code that is generating a collision. The architecture would have been easy to implement if the code generation was in the backend. However, right now the client decides on the code. This created a challenge as the only way to avoid collision is to make a large enough code that the probability of repetition is quite low hence the UUID. Right now the new implementation uses the current date in a millisecond as a parameter and then utilize a randomiser for code ensuring that we get shorter codes with a lower chance of repetition and is much easier from UX point of view. The repo had a very strict linter which made it difficult for me to debug the repo