Wiki-Lie

This is a mono-repo containing a Solid.js frontend and Express/Socket.io backend for running Wiki-Lie.

History

Wiki-lie is a game inspired from the Tom Scott web series "Two of these people are lying", you can view all their episodes here.

The premise of the game is fairly simple. One person is chosen as the judge and then each other player finds a niche Wikipedia article and reads a bit about it. Then one of these articles is chosen at random (the judge doesn't know who's article is who's). Each of the players then tries to convince the judge they know what the article is about by describing it. And of course, here is where bulshitting skills come into play - if it's not your article, then you have to make something up on the spot.

A few years ago when I first saw these videos, I was really interested in playing the game myself. So I forced some of my friends to sit down and we individually searched for articles, wrote the title down, put it in a hat, and then had the judge select one at random. This process was extremely cumbersome and inefficient. This type of game was ripe for a web interface that automizes all of the annoying bits: finding a good article, choosing a random article, and keeping track of score. So I developed one iteration using socket.io and jQuery (before I knew what a JS framework was). Too buggy and unmaintainable. So I tried again, this time using express/socket.io/React. Again, too buggy, but definitely an improvement.

Now I think I have the requisite experience to fully develop this game and release it to the public.

Frontend

Solid.js

The bloat of React has turned me off for some time, so I am going to try using Solid.js for this.

Backend

Express

We use express to manage a node.js backend. Doesn't really do much except serve the public_html directory.

Socket.io

We use socket.io to manage state synchronization across clients

Messages

From Client:

1. join-game: {gameID, clientID}
   1. If the game exists, it sends a message back to the client
2. create-game:
3. choose-article: {clientID, articleName}
4. make-guess: {clientID}

From Server:

1. game-state: {<game-info>}
   1. Sends an entire object representing the current state of the game a client is in
   2. Includes all relevant game information (i.e. game settings, whether the game is started, chosen article, host, players, etc.)