Avalon role-dealer and gameplay

A Meteor.js app that handles the Avalon night-phase and, newly, the in-game mechanics minus chatting. (#coronavirus2019.)

This project (and even the README) started out by cannibalizing turbomaze's Petra (#neverforgetyourroots), but has since developed way beyond what it started out as, as I learned more and more about Meteor and how it works -- clearing out technical debt, etc.

Usage

When users navigate to the app homepage, they're faced with a login form and list of game rooms. Once they've joined a room, they're presented with a waiting page until the game starts.

Accounts

There's a simple registration system. Users type in a unique username and (hopefully unique :) password to log in.

NOTE: Currently, accounts are wiped 6 days after creation.

Game Rooms

Game rooms are either password protected or they're not. In order to join a password protected game room, users need to provide the correct password.

The user who created the game room is designated the room's owner, which gives them the power to start the game and delete the game room. If they leave the game room, another user is randomly chosen to be the room's owner.

NOTE: Game rooms are wiped 12 hours after creation.

Game Play

Once the room owner starts the game, everyone will receive a role based on the total number of players, as well as receive any information that role has. (For example, the player who receives Merlin will also see the usernames of the Spies [Assassin, Morgana, Oberon, etc.].)

Proposals, missions, and vote history all happen and are tracked in real-time inside the game room once the game starts.

Changes in the works (Feature requests)

• Add a way for room owner to pass ownership to a different person in the lobby.
• Give players some way to reveal their information, i.e. "flip their card".
• Give game owner an "end game" functionality that reveals all players' roles.
• "Fun" modes that happen with low probability... (and possibly a way for the owner to disable them)
• Just look at all the TODOs in the code :)

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How to get started developing on this project

Clone the project

I like the GitHub desktop client... :D as that makes it pretty easy to manage everything.

Install meteor

https://www.meteor.com/install

Run things

• Run meteor in the project directory (probably called .../avalon/).
  • It will do a bunch of stuff / installations.
• It may complain that you need to run other commands like meteor npm install --save babel-runtime. If so, do that, and re-run meteor.

You should be good to go, now...

Things to know...

The structure of this project has been modeled after the Meteor guide. Please read up on that if you have questions about the code as you encounter them; otherwise, just ask me. The example app that the guide often references is the Meteor Todos app. The example app is the reason why a lot of this project's code is the way it is -- it seems like a best practice established by the Meteor community. (Code written this way also removes some of the "magic" "action at a distance" properties that some Meteor projects seem to have, which can be quite confusing at times.)

In particular, you will notice that the client and server directories are mostly... "empty"! (Actually, these are special directories whose code is always loaded by the framework, on the client side and on the server side respectively. Even subdirectories that have these names are treated as special, and the files inside those directories are only linked in to the respective side.) Apparently, this "emptiness" is by design. The idea is to import all of the dependencies we need, so that we don't link in any dependencies we don't need -- for example, test code that lives side-by-side with the implementation.

The imports directory is a special directory where the code is never included by default, and files in that directory rely on the ECMAScript import keyword to make their way into the app. You will notice that almost all of the app is written inside of the imports directory.

Materialize!

The UI for this project is handled by the Materialize npm package. The package is included into this project via client/main.js, and gives global access to all of the goodness explained in the Materialize documentation.

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Release process

I've been using Galaxy to deploy the Meteor app with minimal configuration. I separately set up a MongoDB database using https://cloud.mongodb.com/ free tier quota.

There are decent instructions online, but the gist of it is:

Run meteor in the project directory so that the app is built and you can tell whether you need any other dependencies.

Add a tuple in <project-directory>/settings.json so that Meteor can connect to MongoDB using the URL that the Atlas database UI shows, filling in the necessary fields, e.g.:

{
  "galaxy.meteor.com": {
    "env": {
      "MONGO_URL": "mongodb+srv://<username>:<password>@<atlas-provided-domain>/<dbname>?retryWrites=true&w=majority"
    }
  }
}

(settings.json is intentionally .gitignored, since it contains private login information).

Then...

(On windows)

From the project directory (e.g. <your path>/GitHub/avalon)

SET DEPLOY_HOSTNAME=galaxy.meteor.com
meteor deploy <choose.any.sub.domain>.meteorapp.com --settings .\settings.json
# ... wait 10-20 minutes ... check up on progress/logs in your Galaxy account.

(I've been using avalon as the subdomain for meteorapp.com, above.)