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Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

boardzilla.io

41–50 of 111 posts

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#41
post #24

Don't called your project *Zilla. The copyright owners of Godzilla are known to go after everyone who tries to use the "Zilla" suffix. Mozilla learned its lesson long ago and had to negotiate a special agreement.

How would this even remotely relate to Godzilla or it’s copyright?

It’s not even close to a big scary nuclear fueled monster.

I’ll note that the only TM case they ever lost was against a company selling trash bags named ‘trashzilla’, partially because it did not constitute a danger to Toho’s business interests.

Edit: Uh, I missed the logo. Definitely a problem.

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#42

Looks good! There's a lot of moving parts for such a wide array of functionality, so this looks like a lot of really good work! If nothing else, it's nice to have a game engine that focuses on tabletop games, that doesn't necessarily focus on how to render said games. All of that said, as someone who has developed a card and dice game, using plain html and javascript to create a programmatic version that could be pla…

It looks like it's based on two main classes, which make sense in context of the physicality of board games. You have things you move around (`Piece`s), in your hand, from player (`Player`) to player and onto different spaces on the table itself (`Space`).

So for game you'd need your dice and your cards to be defined subclassing `Piece`, and give them to your players (which subclass `Player`) and maybe also to a Teller (also `Player` who manages the deck, before thinking about which instances of `Space` you'll need to set up on your board for your rules.

Your rules all in an instance of the `Game` class and it itself has this concept of actions, at their core instances of the `Action` class. Those take arguments that allow you to write the prompts for the user, define when the action is legal in play, and what effect it should have.

Beyond that the API then just kicks in and seems to have a lot of handy functions for finding pieces, making comparisons, all the stuff you expect. Beyond that just depends on your game logic.

There's also some handy functions to filter for different Spaces and Pieces so that you can build up the UI logic quite quickly, judging by the examples.

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#43
post #24

Don't called your project *Zilla. The copyright owners of Godzilla are known to go after everyone who tries to use the "Zilla" suffix. Mozilla learned its lesson long ago and had to negotiate a special agreement.

Woah, this is wild. Never knew how aggressive the copyrights were for *Zilla.

Wonder how the people of Zillah Washington feel about it

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#44
Nice. I have a ton of board game prototypes I'd like to make web games of at some point, so I spent a little time writing up some functions for a general board game library myself for making board games, but didn't get too far (just some grid generation, custom die rolling, card drawing, tournament functions, some tests to demonstrate various scenarios, and a few other things). But I'll never have time to do it properly, especially juggling other projects. Maybe I'll just see how easy it is to work with your library.

I concur it's a bit painful to learn the BGA platform, as it's 1) stuck on their platform, you won't be able to put the game anywhere else, and 2) all in PHP, which I prefer not to write in anymore, and 3) with documentation scattered around in various places, including a couple of Powerpoint presentations.

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#45
You're using Typescript+CSS. Was hoping you'd support Python on the server, for game logic. Your timing is good because developers and publishers currently using BGA are unsettled and spooked by Asmodee's business model.

BGA Studio's stack is JS/CSS + PHP (client and server) + MySQL [0]

Yucata.de is JS + HTML + .NET 4.5 on the server [1]

(TTS was using Lua, which I looked into but seemed eccentric and limited, it's not even OO, why on earth choose a non-OO language for a boardgame).

Also here's a useful review of sites/frameworks from 2021: "VassalEngine: Survey of other boardgame software" [2]

Can you please please please integrate with Python on the server?

[0]: https://boardgamearena.com/doc/Studio

[1]: https://www.yucata.de/en/FAQ#t17

[2]: https://forum.vassalengine.org/t/survey-of-other-boardgame-s...

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#46
post #45

You're using Typescript+CSS. Was hoping you'd support Python on the server, for game logic. Your timing is good because developers and publishers currently using BGA are unsettled and spooked by Asmodee's business model. BGA Studio's stack is JS/CSS + PHP (client and server) + MySQL [0] Yucata.de is JS + HTML + .NET 4.5 on the server [1] (TTS was using Lua, which I looked into but seemed eccentric and limited, it's n…

> why on earth choose a non-OO language for a boardgame

Lua has usually been a very popular choice for game developers. One reason is that it gives you an easy way to embed a scripting language in your game.

You can do OOP without classes [0].

> Can you please please please integrate with Python on the server?

You expect the developer to port and maintain their entire project to Python because you can't be bothered to learn a new programming language?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)#Obj...

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#47
post #45

You're using Typescript+CSS. Was hoping you'd support Python on the server, for game logic. Your timing is good because developers and publishers currently using BGA are unsettled and spooked by Asmodee's business model. BGA Studio's stack is JS/CSS + PHP (client and server) + MySQL [0] Yucata.de is JS + HTML + .NET 4.5 on the server [1] (TTS was using Lua, which I looked into but seemed eccentric and limited, it's n…

What is Asmodees business model and what does it have tondo with BGA?

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#48
post #24

Don't called your project *Zilla. The copyright owners of Godzilla are known to go after everyone who tries to use the "Zilla" suffix. Mozilla learned its lesson long ago and had to negotiate a special agreement.

Revzilla and Partzilla also had a long legal conflict over the *zilla name.

Re: Show HN: Boardzilla, a framework for making web-based board games

#50
post #45

You're using Typescript+CSS. Was hoping you'd support Python on the server, for game logic. Your timing is good because developers and publishers currently using BGA are unsettled and spooked by Asmodee's business model. BGA Studio's stack is JS/CSS + PHP (client and server) + MySQL [0] Yucata.de is JS + HTML + .NET 4.5 on the server [1] (TTS was using Lua, which I looked into but seemed eccentric and limited, it's n…

> why on earth choose a non-OO language for a boardgame Lua has usually been a very popular choice for game developers. One reason is that it gives you an easy way to embed a scripting language in your game. You can do OOP without classes [0]. > Can you please please please integrate with Python on the server? You expect the developer to port and maintain their entire project to Python because you can't be bothered t…

Seems pretty trivial to support Python serverside. Python is very easy to run in a lightweight isolated container (and you can compile it to static executable). The game data that the engine makes available to the server side code looks pretty standard and doesn't look like a huge shim to maintain.

You could even cross compile the Python to typescript for a simplified server side environment (typy for example).

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