Thomas Jiang

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No Thanks! (Card Game)

23 March 2017

An online multiplayer version of No Thanks!, the award winning card/board game invented by Thorsten Gimmler and published by Amigo Spiele. Written in javascript. Powered by Node.js, Socket.io, and Phaser.io. Hosted on Heroku.

No Thanks! Demo

I spent a couple weekends working on this project and it’s to the point where it has reached minimal viable product at the time. I did this project as a way to learn more about these technologies and have some practice in writing games. Not only do I think No Thanks! is an excellent, elegant game, but it also proves to be a pretty simple one to implement (in part because it is so elegant). While the project in its current state is not error free and the code is definitely quite shoddy, it is playable.

This being my first “completed” game project, the experience was very enlightening. Most of my time spent was not actually writing code or fixing bugs, but trying to figure out documentation. While many of the tools are very powerful, well written, and have documentation, the only thing that really clicked was actually doing it and having to, through trial and error, figure out what worked and what didn’t. Extensive StackOverflow and Googling certainly helped alot, but at the end of the day, actually sitting down and writing it was extremely useful. Since I did not know exactly what I was doing and simply forging ahead taking the path of least resistance, the design of the project ended up being quite bad, something I will remember for next time. Finally, I learned that I need to block off large chucks of time to be productive. I keep getting distracted by the internet that I can spend alot of time without getting stuff done.

I am especially thankful to the creators and maintainers of Heroku, Node.js, Socket.io, Phaser.io, and OpenGameArt, whose work consists of 90%+ of the project, as well as those on StackOverflow answering questions.