Sam Weese
I graduate college on Saturday. For the past 3 and a half years, I have made friends, worked with, and enjoyed "hanging" with my peers at college. All of that may go away from me this coming Sunday.
Dr. Aurisano and I discussed this reality earlier in the semester. The time after college can be isolating, as the natural bonds and stages of life that my friends and I are at are about to rapidly diverge. One of the ways which this can be helped, however, is to have some form of recurring game.
I personally play Poker, and I have friends who do as well. We used to play poker every Saturday night, with the buy in being pushups. I want to still continue that, however most online poker sites require a financial buy in. So to fight isolation and continue relationships, I am implementing a card library, which I will eventually write a free version of poker in.
I started this project by looking at a number of other sites, including PokerStars, Cards and Castles (which I helped develop previously) and Cards and Castles 2, and Card Games.io. I analyzed what I liked and didn't like with each of them.
The site displays a gambling table. Each player is represented by a pair of cards, and a stack icon with a number indicating chip count. The hand itself is a fixed size, and it displays two cards. Both are in essensse a png. To make actions, such as bet, bid, etc. there are buttons underneath the cards.
I personally don't like the table asthetic. I want it instead to be a clean feeling, where it doesn't feel like a casino. I do like seeing other players hands and amount. I don't think that the poker table encompasses all the interactions. You can't reorder your cards, and I dislike that. I think the buttons make things interesting, however.
There is no central play area except to display cards.
This displays cards fanning out in the hand. I dislike that you can't see the whole card without hovering on it, and it would be a cool option to have it spread. Playing cards is done via drag and drop. I do like that, but I think that that would take a lot of work. I'll add that in the future.
This is a site with tons of card games. I like that the cards show nicely and stack on each other to have a compressed area, but the site only supports traditional card games. I think I want my cards to do more than just this!
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I don't want this library to tie 1 component to another component. A player should have a hand, and a hand should have cards, but the type of cards, where the cards can go, what they can do should all be library agnostic.
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I want the deck to display a card, and the play area to display cards.
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I want cards to have unlimited additional functionality, and hotkeys. So hovering over a card and then clicking a hot key should execute some form of lambda function upon it.
This should be a set of cards displayed to only one user. Realistically, it should be seen as the back of cards by other players, but that is for the future and networking.
This can just be a card, which upon clicking removes a card from que of the deck.
This should be agnostic, and not really implemented. A simple, overridable one would just be playing cards onto a deck.
I implemented this all in a single folder, src. I have the website serve only the display area, as an example of an implementation. Each file is structured by the following:
imports
- this is all files which we might need from other areas
prop object
- this is any form of data structure we might have created in this file. Examples include the card, hand, deck, and play area.
prop object interface return
- this is a function which in essense acts as a constructor for the prop object UI. This is what is actually drawn.
exports
- this is any data we might want to use elsewhere
- I used chatgpt to start this project! Here is the first pass.
Obviously the work is never finished. Specifically I want to add the following features:
- Peer to Peer networking for multiplayer play
- Non-react implementation (for speed)
- Adding hover over clicking