Werewolf/README.md

Find the latest deployment here: https://playwerewolf.uk.r.appspot.com/. I value your feedback.

An application to run games of Werewolf (Mafia) smoothly when you don't have a deck, or when you and your friends are together virtually. Inspired by my time playing Ultimate Werewolf and by 2020's quarantine. The app is free to use and anonymous.

After a long hiatus from maintaining the application, I have come back and undertaken a large-scale redesign, rewriting most of the code and producing a result that I believe is more stable and has much more sensible client-server interaction.

Features

This is meant to facilitate a game through a shared game state and various utilities - not to control every aspect of the game flow. The app provides a host the ability to construct a deck with a custom distribution of roles. Players can join a game with one click and are then dealt a role to their device. The app features a concealable role card, an optional shared timer (which the moderator can play/pause), a reference for roles in the game, and status information for players including who is alive/dead and who has had their role revealed. The app also provides the option for a "dedicated moderator" or a "temporary moderator." Dedicated moderators will never be dealt in, and will have all controls and information from the beginning of the game. Temporary moderators will be dealt a role and will have some moderator powers, but will only exist until the first player is out, at which point that player will be made the game's dedicated moderator. A dedicated moderator can transfer their powers to another player that is out of the game at any time.

The application prioritizes responsiveness. A key scenario would be when a group is hanging out with only their phones.

Tech Stack

This is a Node.js application. It is written purely using JavaScript/HTML/CSS. The main dependencies are Express.js and Socket.io. It is fully open-source and under the MIT license. This was (and still is) fundamentally a learning project, and thus I welcome collaboration and feedback of any kind.

All pixel art is my own, for better or for worse.

Contributing and Developers' Guide

Running Locally

If you haven't already, install Node.js. This should include the node package manager, npm.

Run npm install from the root directory to install the necessary dependencies.

These instructions assume you are somewhat familiar with Node.js and npm. At this point, we will use some of the run commands defined in package.json.

First, start a terminal in the root directory. Execute npm run build:dev. This uses Webpack to bundle javascript from the client/src directory and place it in the client/dist directory, which is ignored by Git. If you look at this command as defined in package.json, it uses the --watch flag, which means the process will continue to run in this terminal, watching for changes to JavaScript within the client/src directory and re-bundling automatically. You definitely want this if making frequent JavaScript changes to client-side source code. Any other changes, such as to HTML or CSS files, are not bundled, and thus your changes will be picked up simply by refreshing the browser.

Next, in a separate terminal, we will start the application:

npm run start:dev (if developing on a linux machine)
npm run start:dev:windows (if developing on a windows machine)

This will start the application and serve it on the default port of 5000. This command uses nodemon to listen for changes to server-side code (Node.js modules) and automatically restart the server. If you do not want this, run instead npm run start:dev:no-hot-reload or npm run start:dev:windows:no-hot-reload.

And there we go! You should be able to navigate to and use the application on localhost. There are additional CLI arguments you can provide to the run commands that specify things such as port, HTTP vs HTTPS, or the log level. I highly recommend consulting these below.

CLI Options

These options will be at the end of your run command following two dashes e.g. npm run start:dev -- [options]. Options are whitespace-delimited key-value pairs with the syntax [key]=[value] e.g. port=4242. Options include:

• port. Specify an integer port for the application.
• loglevel the log level for the application. Can be info, error, warn, debug, or trace.
• protocol either HTTP or HTTPS. If you specify HTTPS, the server will look in client/certs for localhost certificates before serving the application over HTTPS - otherwise it will revert to HTTP. Using HTTPS is particularly useful if you want to make the application public on your home network, which would allow you to test it on your mobile device. Careful - I had to disable my computer's firewall for this to work, which would of course make browsing the internet much riskier.

Testing

Unit tests are written using Jasmine. Execute them by running npm run test. They reside in the spec/unit directory, which maps 1:1 to the application directory structure - i.e. unit tests for server/modules/GameManager are found in spec/unit/server/modules/GameManager_Spec.js

Code Formatting

This application uses ESLint to enforce code formatting standards. This configuration is found at the root in .eslintrc.json. To audit the codebase, run npx eslint [directory], and to fix them along with that, run npx eslint [directory] --fix.