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

boardzilla.io

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

#71

Post by joshbuddy »

smcin wrote: 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…

The reason the server isn't in Python is because in boardzilla, you don't express your game twice, once for the client and once for the server. Instead, you express the game once in typescript, and that code is actually used on both the server and client. The client is operating a lot like the server, just without the hidden information.

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

#72

Post by joshbuddy »

jitl wrote: post #62
doublerabbit wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Josh, I'm receiving an error upon accessing the page. Object.hasOwn is not a function. (In 'Object.hasOwn(t,n)', 'Object.hasOwn' is undefined)

Your browser is too old to work with the library. Object.hasOwn is available for 93% of users according to https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_object_hasown

I'm going to add a polyfill later for this. Thanks for the bug reports

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

#73

Post by joshbuddy »

eps wrote: post #69

All sample games show an error: Object.hasOwn is not a function. (In 'Object.hasOwn(e,A.from)', 'Object.hasOwn' is undefined) The stack trace is: su@https://www.boardzilla.io/build/_shared/chunk-ZEYFFM3P.js:16:114536 Fs@https://www.boardzilla.io/build/_shared/chunk-QNN53S6I.js:9:128279 Ch@https://www.boardzilla.io/build/_shared/chunk-QNN53S6I.js:11:180657 ... Perhaps put some polyfill in place?

Thank you, polyfill incoming!

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

#74

Post by dharmab »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #68
dharmab wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's pretty clear that "zilla" is a genericised word suffix, cf "bridezilla", in English. Whilst it seems to originate with Godzilla -- which honestly also doesn't seem to associate with a particular company but instead I would say it's a now traditional monster name in stories, like Dracula -- noone is confusing this with any Godzilla franchise. These sort of attempts to own a word sten, across trademark categories,…

> Whilst it seems to originate with Godzilla -- which honestly also doesn't seem to associate with a particular company but instead I would say it's a now traditional monster name in stories, like Dracula

This is a really weird take. Dracula is in the public domain, while every piece of Godzilla media is still copyrighted and trademarked to Toho, one of the big four movie studios of Japan.

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

#76

Post by jamager »

vindex10 wrote: post #15
jamager wrote: post #7

Looks very cool, congrats on the initiative! I think it can be great to develop prototypes, but to build a BGA alternative you will need permission from the publishers to implement / distribute their games, and given how big is BGA and that it belongs to Asmodee, that is going to be tough... Hope I am wrong, good luck!

IANAL, it seems, game mechanics can't be copyrighted, unless you use the same images for cards / board, or literally copy the rule book. > In short: you can trademark the name, logos. Have copyright on art (even the board itself as art). You can't copyright the mechanics, processes or rules. That explains the Monopoly/Scrabble clones. https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/10f2nov/comment/j4... which refers to thi…

Mechanics can't be copyrighted, but the board gaming community can smell rip offs from afar and don't particularly appreciates them.

Besides, it's going to be madness to advertise that you have the game X on your platform but can't use the name or any artwork.

If I were the OP, i'd try to gear this towards publishers and make it as easy as possible to create functional prototypes. They need to iterate countless times on prototypes, one little change at a time, and this could be a huge time saver for them, facilitate playtasting, etc...

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

#77

Post by Longwelwind »

You might be interested by an open-source project I started a few years ago but never really finished: https://github.com/ravens-engine/core

I had the idea after developing Swords and Ravens, an online adaption of A Game of Thrones: the Board Game (2nd edition), and realizing that there was a way to make a library to allow people to create board games without having to bother with the network part.

I also wrote a blog post about it: https://longwelwind.net/blog/networking-turn-based-game/

Good luck in your project!

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

#78

Post by [deleted] »

Longwelwind wrote: post #77

You might be interested by an open-source project I started a few years ago but never really finished: https://github.com/ravens-engine/core I had the idea after developing Swords and Ravens, an online adaption of A Game of Thrones: the Board Game (2nd edition), and realizing that there was a way to make a library to allow people to create board games without having to bother with the network part. I also wrote a blo…

[deleted]

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

#79

Post by joshbuddy »

Longwelwind wrote: post #77

You might be interested by an open-source project I started a few years ago but never really finished: https://github.com/ravens-engine/core I had the idea after developing Swords and Ravens, an online adaption of A Game of Thrones: the Board Game (2nd edition), and realizing that there was a way to make a library to allow people to create board games without having to bother with the network part. I also wrote a blo…

Oh wow, thanks, I'll check this out.

We were doing something more like merely recording the game moves and applying them to arrive at the game state (having deterministic per-session rng). It's a good way to do it, but for the same of simplicity, this time around we just record the whole json blob per move. It simplifies undos and it also lets us easily move through history if you want to view a previous state.

But I'd love to try to apply some of your lessons to a later version. The challenge for us now is making a good api for expressing board games. That's been really tricky tbh. We've been working on this for ~7 years and have gone through many iterations of this api trying to get it right. I sure hope we're closer this time.

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

#80

Post by Longwelwind »

joshbuddy wrote: post #79
Longwelwind wrote: post #77

You might be interested by an open-source project I started a few years ago but never really finished: https://github.com/ravens-engine/core I had the idea after developing Swords and Ravens, an online adaption of A Game of Thrones: the Board Game (2nd edition), and realizing that there was a way to make a library to allow people to create board games without having to bother with the network part. I also wrote a blo…

Oh wow, thanks, I'll check this out. We were doing something more like merely recording the game moves and applying them to arrive at the game state (having deterministic per-session rng). It's a good way to do it, but for the same of simplicity, this time around we just record the whole json blob per move. It simplifies undos and it also lets us easily move through history if you want to view a previous state. But I…

You might be interested in the Phase abstraction of my engine.

Basically you represent your board game as a tree of phases through which your game progresses in.

Each node of your phase tree can contain state. At any point, your game is at leaf of your tree, and the state of the game is composed of all the states of all the nodes from the current leaf-phase to the root of the tree. Each leaf node also have a set of possible inputs describing what possible action players can take to progress into the game. This makes it really easy to handle games that have special "rare" phase that can break the flow of the game (for 7 Wonders: Duel, for example, phases where players must resolve a wonder's effect that asks them to destroy an opponent's card).

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