Some Preliminary Thoughts About a New Card Game Website

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2021-05-30 09:00:04

For the past month and a half or so, I’ve been working on a new software system for playing card games online. If you’d like to follow along it’s being hosted on sourcehut.

The idea came to me when I was talking with a friend who shares two notable characteristics with me: 1) he is a computer programmer; 2) he’s an enthusiast of obscure traditional card games. He was implementing a new card game on Board Game Arena, which is more or less the best that you can currently do if you want to build a new card game that can be played online and don’t want to implement the entire site from scratch. It’s a generic board games/card games site which has a “studio” feature, where developers can upload their own logic which describes a new game. It’s also, from where I sit, a pretty poor experience: you need to write your game in PHP, and you need to upload it by FTP. It’s a little antiquated, in other words.

Hearing about the developer experience I had the sudden inspiration of a site that worked on the Slack installable apps model instead: one that exposed the generic bones of interaction with a deck of cards, but where you as the developer wrote a simple JSON API to describe the actual game, and installed the game simply by pointing the site at your callback URL. In other words, you could write the game itself in whatever language you liked, and only had to spin up a new web server rather than using anyone’s crufty old library.

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