channels-obstruction

A simple game of Obstruction created to explore Django + Django Channels + ReactJS Blog Post and Tutorial at: http://www.codyparker.com/django-channels-with-react

Synopsis

I started this project to explore the Django Channels, which is an upcoming core app that adds asynchronous WebSocket support to the wonderful Django Framework. Channels makes it very easy to build "real-time" apps in pure Django and Python, providing a great way to develop applications that require features such as "real-time" collaboration or chat for example.

Obstruction is a 2-player pen and paper game which involves players taking turns claiming free spots on a grid. The spot they choose, and all surrounding spots are then claimed for that player and can no longer be claimed by another player. The play continues back-and-forth until there are no free spots to claim. The last player to successfully claim a spot, wins the game.

This project also uses React to handle the reactive, client-side components. I picked React because I like it, but it could be swapped out with Angular/Vue/Knockout/etc....

Features

Full game functionality:
- Authentication - Signup / Login
- Game Lobby with live updating list of available games
- Ability to create a game that will show up in other users' availiable games list
- Gameboard that enforces Obstruction rules and allows players to take turns and see the results in real-time
- Game log that tracks all moves and reports them live as they occur
- Players can chat in the game log
Lobby and Gameboard are made up of ReactJS components on the client-side
Examples of how to mix standard Django templating with ReactJS
Webpack integration to create separate bundles needed for different parts of the application
Django Rest Framework used to help serialize data needed by React as well as provides API endpoints for client-side data calls
Mixed use of DRF, standard Django context sent from the view, as well as communication through channels to demostrate multiple ways to interact with data and the Django backend

Requirements

Django >= 1.9
Django Channels
Django Rest Framework
Django Webpack Loader
Node & Node Package Manager

Installation

Fork and clone this repository
Create a Python virtual environemnt
In that environment, run pip install -r requirements.txt inside your project
Install node modules with npm install
Create the local database with python manage.py migrate
Run webpack to build the components with npm run webpack
Run Django development server on port 8080 - python manage.py runserver 8080

License

MIT License