Show HN: Gamesroom.io – board games and video chat

Show HN: Gamesroom.io – board games and video chat(gamesroom.io)

11 points by mjt58 5 years ago | 3 comments

mjt58 5 years ago |

GamesRoom.io is an experimental web app I've made to combine video chat and board games, initially just for one-on-one play.

It was, unsurprisingly, prompted by pandemic-related lockdowns: I wanted to give my son a way of carrying on learning draughts and chess with his Grandpa.

It's built with Svelte and Twilio’s Programmable Video products -- P2P rooms and JavaScript SDK. I've also used a couple of JS libraries to provide some of the game logic.

My son has been using it for months to play draughts against his relatives and friends.

I've found he'll happily play for over an hour on this with his Grandpa but will get bored with a normal zoom call within ~5 mins and leave us to make his excuses ..!

Graffur 5 years ago |

Nice, I think this type of thing is definitely needed. When the pandemic hit and everyone at home this type of web app was severely lacking.

Also, great to see Svelte being used

mjt58 5 years ago | |

Thanks! Yes, I could have done with launching a few months sooner, but I only had the idea at the start of the year :-D

It was really fun using Svelte. I've been looking for a reason to use it for real for a few years (I do mostly vanilla JS in the day job, amongst other things).

I had to do the most thinking and refactoring around how to handle application state in Svelte stores. I pinched some useful approaches for that from the Budibase repo (https://github.com/Budibase/budibase).