Villains Online

My covid-19 project! My game group missed being able to get together to play our self created board game Villains. So I decided to bring it to the web so we could keep playing while staying safe.

Visit the live site: https://playvillains.jeremykalgreen.com

Villains is a board game for 3-5 players in which players take on the role of a villainous faction attempting to take over The City. Place your hidden action tokens in the city in a devilish attempt to complete your secret plans.

Since this site was created to allow my game group to keep playing during the pandemic it assumes the users are already familiar with how to play Villains, and thus doesn't include any sort of tutorials (yet). But you can read the full game rules here.

Built With

Laravel
Vue
Node
Express
Socket.io

Prerequisites

PHP 7.4
MySQL 8
Composer
Node

The Good Stuff

I'm mostly using laravel for authentication and storing the game's save files in the database. So if you are poking around the repo and want see how the game works all of the interesting stuff is in the /server directory, just a head's up.

Installation

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/amorphia/villains-online.git

Switch to the repository's folder

cd villains-online

Install php dependencies using composer

composer install

Install node dependencies using NPM

npm install

Copy the example env file and update its contents to suit your local environment (most importantly set up a local database and configure it within your .env)

copy .env.example .env

Generate an application key

php artisan key:generate

Run the database migrations

php artisan migrate

Start the local http server

php artisan serve

Open a new command line and navigate to the game server's folder

cd villains-online/server

Start the local node game server

node server.js

Avoiding localhost CORS issues

Chances are you will need to tell your browser to allow the http server and game server to talk to each other, as modern browsers block communication from one port to another on localhost. You can read more about the problem here.

My solution for chrome on Windows is to call up the Windows Run Dialog (Windows key + R) and run Chrome with the --disable-web-security flag set.

chrome.exe --user-data-dir="c:/tmp/chrome_dev" --disable-web-security

But there are a number of other possible solutions that, again, you can read about here

Installation complete

You can now access villains-online at http://localhost:8000

Of course since villains online is a multiplayer game you'll need to run at least two parallel sessions to really poke around very far. The easiest way I've found to do that is to use the SessionBox extension for Chrome.

Project Status

This is still very much a work in progress, but I have a few things I'm really looking to tackle soon:

Add tutorials and information for new players
Add informational popups to basically everything on right click
Add a spectator mode to allow guests to view a game in progress
Fix a number of UI/UX issues
Minor gameplay bugs

amorphia/villains-online