WordChainGame - compete with other players to build the longest word chain

In the Word Chain Game, players take turns adding a word to a growing chain, with each new word starting with the last letter of the previous one. The objective is to build the longest chain without repeating words, and the player who will be the last to fail while appending the words to the growing chain, wins the game.

You can experience the game here: wordchaingame.jkaw.xyz

Features

• Play without the necessity to create the account - a UUID can be used to access your account
• Create and join game rooms
• Close and open a room to avoid unexpected guests
• Communicate with other players using lobby and room chats.
• Define game type (well, for now just one) and it's game parameters
• Kick troublesome players from your room
• Play a game
• Go over the game progress after it finishes
• Run a recurring job, periodically cleaning abandoned room from the lobby
• Introduce mute/ownership buttons
• Check the leaderboards and your game history
• Create Dockerfiles and docker-compose of the application
• Create CI pipelines responsible for linting building and pushing Docker Images to AWS ECR
• Deploy the application on AWS ECS using AWS Postgres RDS
• Create CD pipeline
• Deploy with 2 independent game servers sharing transient state in Redis

Tech Stack

• Frontend – Typescript, React, Boostrap/Bootstrap-React
• Backend – Fastapi, Pydantic, Websockets, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL

Backend

1. Websockets

Websockets are used for broadcasting various events to all affected clients - this includes:

• propagating chat messages
• updating available rooms and their statuses in the lobby
• synchronizing player/room state and settings for all players in a given room
• synchronizing all player with the progress during the game (server-authoritative game)
• and other...

2. API

Actions sent by a client and those which are 'singular' by design, utilize HTTP requests.

3. Asynchronous web server

The webserver is built with FastAPI and features a fully asynchronous code.

4. Persistance

Application stores transient, game-related state in memory - meaning that currently open rooms, active games and player sessions are not persisted. Nonetheless, the history of chat messages, past games (alongside all data to recreate their progress) and players are persisted using SQLAlchemy with a PostgreSQL database.

6. Deployment

Application is deployed on AWS ECS, consisting of 3 services deployed on 3 separate EC2s.

• First one hosts Nginx as a public facing server. It is responsible for serving static React application and acting as a reverse proxy to a FastAPI application.
• Second one hosts Uvicorn, holding transient state and interacting with database
• Third one is a Postgres database running on AWS RDS

Additionally, application uses Docker Compose to orchestrate these services for local deployments.

Frontend

1. Typescript & Javascript

Initially written in JavaScript, the frontend code typing is gradually introduced, with plans to transition fully to TypeScript in the near future.

2. React & Bootstrap

React and boostrap are used to provide interactiveness and styling.