Make joining a game better

[simonbw]

Right now the process of joining a game kinda sucks. It's really annoying to have to share the link between people right now. There are a few ways around this:

Custom Short ID's

It would be really nice to fork shortid to make IDs that are nicer to type in. There are a few parts to this.

Use a better alphabet. We want an alphabet with characters that aren't easily confused with each other and that are easy to read off and type on a phone. This means all lower case letters, excluding l and o, and possibly digits excluding 0 and 1.

Using this alphabet would make our IDs a lot longer in general. So it would be nice if we could make these shorter. There are a few ways of doing this.

List Recently Created Games

You could be presented with a list of games in their join phase. This has a lot of technical implications. We would need to be able to get a list of all games in the join phase. This implies some central list of games rather than just a list on each server. It also has some security implementations. Games would probably need a password if they were globally visible. It also doesn't scale very well ui wise. If a lot of games are getting made,

Codenames For Games

It would be cool if you could give your game a code name that was easier to say and type than the shortid is.

Games near you

Use some sort of location thing to find games near you. This is an interesting idea, but I don't really see it working out well.

Connect to Facebook

Maybe it could connect to facebook to give you an easy way of messaging people the url.

[simonbw]

I have temporarily made ids be consecutive integers to make joining groups easier.

[simonbw]

Also to make it just slightly better, you shouldn't have to add all your words to see the game id.

[simonbw]

To be clear, the issue with consecutive integer ids is that it's really easy to find someone else's game and mess with it.