Turnbase

Turnbase is an IcedCoffeeScript framework for implementing multiplayer online card games, board games, and other similar turn-based games. The core of the project consists of three components:

• A game specification DSL. The code for this resides primarily in the game_engine directory.
• A client-side interface for sending player actions and receiving game state updates. This lives in game_engine/client/setup.iced.
• A client-side canvas widget library to make building UIs easier. This resides in the canvas directory.

There is also a fair amount of server code thrown together to make everything run.

How to run

Note: This project is a work-in-progress, so setup is a little rough around the edges. These instructions work for Ubuntu Linux. They should mostly work for other operating systems but may require manually performing steps in scripts/setup_dev.

Navigate to the project root directory. Then, run the following commands:

./dev.sh # sets up some environment variables
npm install
setup_dev # misc setup, including installing mysql and creating database
games_start # starts the server

You should now be able to visit the main page by going to localhost:8888 in a browser.

Examples

Code for specific games reside in the games directory. See files in games/tictactoe for a basic example. For a much more involved example with detailed comments, see games/battleship.

To create a new game, simply create a new subdirectory of games with an appropriate config.iced file; this will be automatically detected after restarting the server. Besides tictactoe and battleship, other games in the games directory are experimental; you are encouraged to try them out, but they may occasionally be broken.

Testing

There are a few tools in place to help with testing and debugging games. Suppose you are working on tictactoe, and you are running the server locally on port 8888. You can test by going to localhost:8888/testing/tictactoe, which will open two iframes which you can use to play against yourself (note: you need to be logged in). You can also save game states there to test from an intermediate state.

Another tool that may be of use is the canvas debugger. It helps you visualize the hierarchy of canvas UI elements. It can be accessed by calling the function DEBUG.debug_canvas() in the JS console.

Direction of the project

This is a somewhat cleaned-up version of a personal hobby project that I started working on in 2013. I only have time to work on it occasionally, so contributors/forks are welcome. Here are a few medium-term improvements I have in mind:

• Implement a timer mechanism for games to facilitate e.g. time limits on turns.
• Provide a nice framework for animations in the client.
• Refactor game_engine and canvas into standalone modules.
• Make everything work with plain CoffeeScript by using yield statements.

And some long-term improvements:

• Reimplement game_engine as a proper DSL (i.e. with its own compiler and runtime) so that a lot of things can be checked at compile time.
• Reimplement canvas in WebGL for nicer-looking graphics.