Hi.

I've been teaching myself to program multiplayer online games from scratch in Rails using ActionCable and simple DOM manipulation with JavaScript. I'm not looking at documentation for gaming for this project; just trying to figure out how far I can push technology I'm already using: sure, I'm going about making a game the wrong way entirely, but what happens if I do it anyway? This project is called Crepuscular Games; and modeled after sites like Neopets where points and items earned in games could be used across the site as parts of other games, and Twitch, where spectators can comment on games in-progress.

I started by creating site-wide chat rooms using ActionCable that could be accessed from different areas: individual games have their own chat rooms, and there is also a "lobby" chat for the entire site. In Rails, ActionCable allows newly recieved data to be seen by users without refreshing the page, by allowing those changes to be made with CoffeeScript.

I had been thinking about how to use ActionCable, something I'd only used to make chat rooms in the past, to make a multiplayer game. I constructed a tic-tac-toe game using the same basic principles as the chat room, using ActionCable to send data about game moves instead of chat messages. However, a web site where you can watch your friends play tic-tac-toe admittedly isn't very exciting.

The next step up from tic-tac-toe was to expand the grid to a relatively massive interactive environment that players could explore and modify with keyboard-controlled characters. Typically, a Javascript-based game would be made with Canvas, but what happens when you use a CSS grid? It works on the same principles as tic tac toe: each tile is simply a nested div with class names for the foreground and background, and rules for interacting with it are defined, in JavaScript, based on those class names. The coordinates and class names of the tiles are recorded in the database, as well as the coordinates of the player sprite. It was like an extremely pared-down Terraria. This is still pretty buggy, especially the controls, but players are able to see one another and make permanent changes to the board. I made all of the image assets for the game as well. In the future, players will be able to keep items they dig up in the mining game and there may be a crafting section.

The project also gave me the opportunity to get familiar with scheduling automated tasks to clear old chat messages and trigger in-game events, incorporating WYSIWYG editors, email verification, and password recovery in Rails.

It is very much a work in progress, and players are constantly finding new ways of breaking entire sections of the site.

Visit Crepuscular Games

See my code

If you would like to test it without creating an account, you may use the email user@example.com and the password password to log in.

For any of these projects that require login credentials, you may use the username User or the email address user@example.com and the password password.

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