I'm looking for some guidance on a possible project.

I have some interest in creating a site that allows people to play board games together. There are several of them out there already; the one I frequent is brainking.com.

I have basically no current web programming knowledge. Learned HTML a long time ago, but have lost what little knowledge I had through lack of use - only things I've created recently have been basic Wordpress sites.

So I'm wondering just how big a project a site like that would be - either for me to learn how to do, or to pay someone else to create. I'd be happy to start with something where there were 10-20 games to choose from, rather than the 100+ on brainking. I know it's a pretty open-ended question and there's not going to be a simple answer, but even some ballpark answers on time investment to do myself or cost to have someone else create it could be helpful.

This is something of a hard question to answer.

I think it's doable for a decent programmer to make a board game system that people could play online. How long it would take / how hard it would be would to some extent depend on the game, how nice you want it to look and to some extent the feature set you want.

Like, I wrote a version of Settlers of Catan in a few weekends but it's ugly as **** and not at all a finished product. It was not intended to be played online, I used it as a research tool, but adding online capability would not be that hard I think.

Some of the subtleties will be a pain in the ass - detecting that a player has left the game and deciding how to handle that, for example. Handling disconnects/reconnects. Stuff like that.

I guess if I was going to do it, I'd use javascript for the interface and some kind of database-backed web server for the backend (python or ruby or java or even javascript via Node)

I think it would be a huge amount of work (eg: 1+ man-years for an experienced programmer).

To get some idea, have a look at the amount of code that goes into making a client/server for a single game type, eg:

https://github.com/ornicar/lila
https://****************/p/pokerth/c...trunk/pokerth/
https://github.com/jacobhyphenated/PokerServer

Then consider that you'll probably need 2-3x that just to make something capable of defining all the different game types you'll want (ie: before even defining any of the specific games themselves!).

Add to this:

- Creating a design so that new games can be added easily (ie: without massive redesigns/code rewrites, etc) will be especially hard to do well.
- Each board game might on the surface seem to have a simple set of rules, but when you want to completely specify the rules you'll find that there are always a load of weird corner-cases that'll make things much harder... Failing to foresee ANY of these while creating your design will cause a whole bunch of problems later on.

The client/server part will probably not be all that bad to implement (if you get the design right), but defending it from cheats, DoS attacks, etc will be much harder.

Juk

EDIT: For some reason the filter is blocking "sourceforge [dot] net" in the URL above.

Just had a look at that brainking.com site and was surprised they don't run Arimaa?

(I can't see it in the list of games at least?)

Juk

So, you're saying I can't get this going in a couple of weekends?



Something that may not have been noticed, and I didn't think to mention, is that these games aren't real time - they take place over days, weeks, or even several months. One person moves, and the clock starts on the other player, but they will have anywhere from several hours to several days to move. I don't know if that would substantially change anything in the way that it's coded.

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I hadn't heard of it until now.

Actually that changes things a lot. You could get by with a lot "dumber" interface - you could probably do most of it through plain html if you wanted instead of making a javascript app. You could still utilize javascript to make it look/feel nicer but a real time game would almost demand a javascript app just to make it work responsively.

I don't know how involved the games are. But for example I think I could probably make a prototype for, say, a poker game that was played non-interactively, in a few weeks. I'd probably want a few months to make it pretty solid. If it was just me working on it, it would be ugly but functional. 2 guys, one front-end and one back-end could probably launch a decent looking site in 3 months I think.

You're not done when it launches though - you'll find bugs, there will be features you'll want or that players will want that you hadn't thought of.

Rusty's timeline seems about right to me as well

Can anyone tell me how Brainking is run, or how I can figure it out for myself?

You can get some idea of what he's using by looking at the linkedin.com profile of the creator:

https://www.whois.com/whois/brainking.com
https://cz.linkedin.com/in/filiprachunek

You can get some idea of how the site built up over the years by looking at the site's "News Archive" section and/or the Wayback machines:

https://brainking.com/en/News?bms=150
http://web.archive.org/web/*/BrainKing.com

Juk

Do you mean "how the business is run" or "what technology they use to make the site work?"

Wow, that was a terrible worded question on my part.

Yes, the technology. IE is it created in plain html, javascript, etc. Probably a very stupid question, but there it is.

I think if you seriously consider doing this, you'll want to integrate it with Facebook. You'll probably want traffic on your website and I think people get turned away from building new accounts.

I know there are many times when I've come to a website and they want me to register an account and it is too much of a hassle so I click off the page. Maybe it is the Millennial in me, but I just hate registering more accounts. It is just one extra password for me to remember. With Facebook integration it is already ready and not too much of a hassle.

I just went to brainking.com and I feel like their website is ugly. A clean fresh simple look will appeal to a wider audience. I've taught myself HTML, CSS, some PHP, some MySQL, and just began learning some JavaScript. Thanks all to W3shools.com. Honestly, such a great platform.

If you are really interested into getting into creating games. You may consider using something like Gamemaker. It is very suitable for online games in terms of computer users. However, I think you should try and do something that integrates well with mobile devices. I'm not sure what this would be, but I'm sure with a little research you could easily find out.

Hey dude, if you're wanting to hire someone to help you with this project in some way I would be more than willing. I definitely want more money and could probably help you get some more too.

Thanks!

Anyone have some help for me on this one, or did I ask one too many stupid questions?

I had a look at the source, nothing identifying I recognised just plain html/JS/CSS and decided it was probably some homemade system many years old. Guess that wasn't too far off:

http://brainking.com/en/Help?ht=20

Yeah, sorry, jukofyork actually gave you the answer, he was just a little circumspect about it. If you follow his links you can see that it's likely java backend, html/css/somejs in the front end. Dave's post above confirms.

But you don't have to use java - you could use anything for the backend. I wouldn't choose java personally, or recommend it unless the person asking already knew java. But if they already knew java, they wouldn't ask, they'd just use java.

I'd recommend python, ruby or even php for the backend, I think.

LOL, right there on the site and I missed it.

Thanks to everyone for your answers - lots of helpful stuff in there, more than you know as I am considering all sorts of options (including not doing this at all).

Say it would be simple html5/some additional stuff , are any sites letting you host them on their website (with permission to pull them off) ?

not planning to do anything like this but would like idea build it slowly, focus on games and later focus on the website/platform. May not apply for the longer term games like described by the OP.

oh just saw this. My main side project is an adaptation of a permissive license board game that plays 5-10 players. It is fairly successful in that during peak times there's 100 people on and playing. Honestly, can't recommend you do this as a) all the open source/non patented games (chess) have been made a million times and b) you will have constant moderation problems/requests, so much so that I spend most of my time on that instead of features and bug fixes. The internet is awful essentially.

That being said it was very easy to get this working great with react/redux/socketio on the frontend and node/mongo/express/passport/socketio on the backend.

Wait, Zork's not a board game...

In all seriousness, I'd love to see your site, if you wouldn't mind PMing me a link.