Trivia game

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. User experience and game rules
3. Architecture and technical aspects
4. Install

Introduction

Amazing game based on trivia questions where each player can measure his/her ability against other players (and against himself/herself!) and demonstrate his/her knowledge level. There is the possibility for each player to record the best score achieved at the end of each game. A single game consists of a fixed number of 10 questions. We use the terms player and user here with the same meaning.

User experience and game rules

Once the user interface is displayed, it is possible for the player to start answering. Each question has a score according to its level of difficulty:

• 1 easy;
• 2 medium;
• 3 hard.

Once answered a question, if the answer is correct, the corresponding score is added up to the total game score which appears along with the number of answers provided until that moment. Be careful! Once answered a question, it is not possible to change your answer.

Previuos and Next buttons are available in order to navigate a player's game panel: Next allows a player to go head to the next available question; Previous allows a player to come back and check the previous questions already answered. While navigating the Previous button, the current score and the current number of answers provided don't change.
At the end of the game, when a player answers the question number 10, three buttons are displayed:

• Save ;
• Leaderboard;
• Play again.

Save provides the ability to save a player into a permanent storage. A simple mask is displayed asking for a username and password. Once submitted the form:

• the system checks if a user with the typed username already esists into the storage;
• if it exists and the password provided is different from the existing one, for simplicity of design, the old password value is overwritten with the new one;
• if it doesn't exist, a new entry for that user is created on the storage;
• if the score achieved at the end of the current game is greater than the stored one (best score achieved until that moment), the user best score is updated accordingly.

Leaderboard provides a ranking with the top ten players ordered by score, from the greater to the lower one.

Play again provides the ability to start a new game, in this case a new set of 10 questions is automatically reloaded.

Architecture and technical aspects

Trivia game is a flexible distributed application, based on a microservices architecture with:

• a front-end component written in React, called game-ui, responsible to define the user interface and manage the interactive behaviour of the game;
• a back-end microservice written in Node.js, called players-manager, responsible to manage all those back-end aspects related to the players world. It has been designed:
  • to isolate the players management logic within its boundend context;
  • with the API first approach in mind. Indeed, it exposes a complete set of REST APIs wich make simple integrating third party systems;
• a data storage component which is a pouchdb instance, a NO-SQL lightweight database. Since we don't need a relational data model and players related information can easily be represented and retained in a JSON-like format, this is a really good choise.

Install

The only requirement for running the application is just to have Docker installed on your host machine. Microservices will be instantiated as Docker containers.

After cloning the project workspace, open a console, navigate the project root and just launch:

docker-compose up

Have a look at the console's log in order to check if containers are correctly set-up.

Invite your friends joining you and ...have fun!