Zomis' Games

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One of the goals with this project is to easily create implementations of several turn-based multiplayer games, both logic and GUI.

This project is a flexible server meant for games. The main idea is to re-use a lot of things between games, so that you don't have to implement these things for every game:

• Online Multiplayer
• AIs
• Replay feature to watch old games
• Statistics (games played, opponents, wins and losses...)

To accomplish this, I realized that a game consists of three different parts:

• The game model
• Which actions are allowed and what they do
• What each player is allowed to see

These three things: Model, Actions, View, are specified in a DSL (Domain Specific Language). The DSL only works as a wrapper around your game implementation, so no matter how complex or simple your game is, it's possible to build it in this DSL.

For this project I decided to use Kotlin in order to be able to re-use code between the server and the client.

If you just want to play...

Play Zomis' Games

Miss a game?

Existing features include:

• Database which stores all games
• Online Multiplayer
• AIs
• 12+ different games implemented

Building and running locally

Running the server locally

To run the server:

./gradlew :games-server:run

OR

./gradlew :games-server:assemble
java -jar games-server/build/libs/games-server-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar

Running the client locally:

cd games-vue-client
npm install && npm run serve

Adding a new game

One of the main goals of this project is that it should be easy to implement a new game in it.

To implement a new game you'll need to add:

• Kotlin code written in the Game-DSL specifying the game model, the game actions, and the game view.
• Mapping in ServerGames.kt
• Vue component to display the game state and fire actions
• Mapping in supportedGames.js

Lessons learned from previous projects

See Lessons learned documentation

Some decisions made

See Decisions made documentation

Documentation and test-cases at the same time

I wrote my own tool to generate documentation for how the client and server communicates. As I am sometimes not motivated to write test-cases and even less motivated to write documentation, I figured that I might as well generate the documentation from the test-cases. I have integrated a check in my build pipeline to make sure that the documentation is not outdated.

Project goals, and differences from other projects

Project Goals

• Open Source
• Implementation of game rules
• Easy accessible (works on all major browsers, should also work on mobile browsers)
• Easy to get started
  • Login using OAuth, or login as guest
  • No complicated registration required
• Relatively uncheatable, including no information sent to frontend that shouldn't be seen
• Statistics and replays
• No achievements and unnecessary stuff
• Computer-controlled opponents to entertain yourself or to think about optimal actions
• Possibility to make your own computer-controlled opponent (if you're a programmer at least, possibly also for others in the future)
• AI:s with Reinforcement Learning (not yet implemented)
• Easy to make new games
• Platform for implementing and play-testing new games and game ideas
  • Provides re-usable components (see #96 for frontend components, some similar functionality also exist for back-end)

Differences from Tabletop Simulator, Board Game Arena and other projects

• No need to download anything, or register
• No "flip table" button (some might consider it the best feature of Tabletop, others both the best and the worst)
• Not just a physics engine. This has all the rules implemented and fully automated
• Computer-controlled opponents
• All games are free, no premium-specific games
• No achievements and unnecessary stuff
• Open Source

TODO-list / Roadmap / Future features

• As Kotlin can be run dynamically using the JVM scripting engine, it would be possible to give advanced players access to this so that they can customize the starting state, or adjust stuff along the way.
• Undo button (opponents needs to agree, naturally)
• Reinforcement Learning AI: Given a game state, learn what the best move is.
• More games!