For the past couple of months I've been working on a little fun side-project that I've decided to call: "Kwissle"
It's an online game where you're paired up randomly with someone else who's online on the site at the same time and you enter a battle of general knowledge questions.
The rules are simple:
- each battle has 10 questions
- you get 15 seconds per question
- if you type in the right answer (spelling mistakes are often allowed) you get 3 points
- if you load the alternatives and get it right you get 1 point
- you have to be fast or else your opponent might steal the question
- whoever has the most points win!
The app has been quite a technical challenge because it's real-time. Like a chat. To accomplish this, I've decided to use the socket.io library with Tornado which means that if your browser supports it, it's using WebSockets or else if falls back on Flash sockets.
Because there is no easy way to source questions, I've instead opted to do it by crowd sourcing. What that simply means is that YOU help out adding the questions. You can also help out by reviewing other peoples questions before I eventually publish them.
Bear with me though; this is an early alpha release and it just about works. There are a tonne of features and improvements I want to add to make it more fun and solid but, like I said, this is a side-project so the only time I get to work on it is late evenings and weekends. The source code is not open but I'm going to try to be entirely open with what's going on on a tumblr blog
Comments
have to admit, it's super fun and very addictive. as a trivia fan, i hope this grows into something big. good luck and best of luck. since you are using the socket.io library, (not that i'm technical) but from your reasoning above, maybe you can integrate some chat functionality against the person you are playing. that would be super fun.
Thanks! A chat would be cool too. You know you can send the person you battled against a message afterwards right? I've been meaning to integrate that better.
I have limited time to work on it but the next thing I'm going to add is the ability to set up your own rules (e.g. only picture questions, category sport, 6 questions per round) and then people can share these rules with its own unique URL. What do you think about that?
I think the max. character limit on the questions needs to be moved up to 80 characters. 60 is too short.
I've would really love to study the source code of Kwissle. How you implement sockets, mongo and tornado.. and such. Hopefully, you'll release the source to let people study your code. Cheers!!