Solaria Tactics

Tactical Card Game inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Hearthstone. Never completed after realizing I bit off more than I could chew with creating tons of animated 3d assets, art and sfx for all the cards and spells, and then launching a multiplayer game requiring an active fan base to make the game work.

Here's a couple of posts I wrote about the tech behind the game though:

https://dillonshook.com/a-better-isometric-camera-control/

https://dillonshook.com/introducing-card-lang/

https://dillonshook.com/actions-and-selections-with-card-lang/

https://dillonshook.com/planned-app-solescence/

Some Interesting Files

cardlang.jison The main grammar file for the card language used for all the cards to say what they do. This gets compiled into the cardlang.js parser file. See the post for more about how the card language works. You can also see the card language in action looking at a card file

CardEvaluator, Selector, AreaSelector, CardSelector, and PieceSelector are all the main files that evaluate the parsed card language, select the appropriate pieces, and turn them into game actions that get put in a queue to run.

GamePiece All the fun data class stuff to make the units work.

AttackPieceProcessor All the processors work on the game action queue and execute the commands after checking to make sure they make sense. A result of executing can be that more actions are pushed onto the queue to be processed. A good example of that would be a piece being attacked, dying, then having it's on death effect apply which does damage to other pieces, which kill them, etc.

CameraMovementView is the script described in A Better Isometric Camera Control Post

MovePieceCommand and ActionMovePieceCommand are the corresponding files on the game client to first ask the server to move a piece, and then the Action file picks up the command from the server over the web socket and updates the clients data.

Game Client

Config

The Unity client uses a config.json file in the centauri-tac folder. Example:

{
    "baseUrl": "http://localhost:10123/",
    "realm": "dev",
    "players": [
        {
            "username": "player1@gmail.com",
            "password": "pw"
        },
        {
            "username": "player2@gmail.com",
            "password": "pw"
        }
    ]
}

Backend and Tooling

Requirements

• NodeJS 6.x (originally, tried upgrading to 18.x)

Setup

Install dependencies:

$ yarn

Set up a docker volume for windows

https://forums.docker.com/t/trying-to-get-postgres-to-work-on-persistent-windows-mount-two-issues/12456/4?u=friism

docker volume create --name postgres-volume -d local

Running

Start a server instance and run all migrations:

$ yarn start

Run the server with nodemon to automatically restart on changes:

$ yarn run dev-server

To create a new database migration:

$ yarn run create-migration MIGRATION_NAME

Run all migrations up (happens implicitly on yarn start as well):

$ yarn run migrate

Run a single migration down (step back 1 migration):

$ yarn run migrate-down

Run all tests

$ yarn test

If card lang is updated run this to rebuild the parser:

$ yarn run build-lang

Components

A server is composed of one of more components that provide various functionality:

• auth Player login and authentication service
• gamelist Master game registry
• game Hosts running game instances
• matchmaker Automatch queue
• log Server app to display client json logs in a nice table

Environment Variables

Environment variables can also be set locally with a .env file (see dot-env-example)

Variable	Notes	Example
COMPONENTS	Comma-separated list of components to start	auth,game,gamelist,matchmaker,log
DATABASE_URL	Postgres connection string	postgres://user:pass@url:1234/schema?ssl=true
PORT	Static file and REST endpoint HTTP port	10123
BCRYPT_ROUNDS	How many rounds to use for hashing work for passwords	10
PUBLIC_URL	Publically-visible URL for all components in this process	http://localhost:10123
AUTH_SECRET	Secret used to sign API auth tokens	aReallyDamnGoodSecret
PING_INTERVAL	How frequently the server pings clients to update latency	2000
PG_USE_SSL	Whether to use SSL for postgres (defaults true)	false
CLIENT_LOG	Where to find the client log file to serve up	./client_log.json
DISCONNECT_TIMEOUT	How long clients have to reconnect before the boot	5000
DEV	Allows some developer commands to be sent to the server	true
CARD_SETS	Which card sets are enabled and going to be loaded	test,basic

Ops

To do DB operations on the server, exec into the db: docker exec -it stac_db_1 bash

Run the psql cmd line tool: psql -h localhost -U postgres

Then you can run your commands select * from players; <-- Must end with semicolon

\q to quit