Introducing Deep Sea Adventure's Scoring App

This website is a scoring tool dedicated to the board game Deep Sea Adventure edited by Oink Games.

Its goal is to provide players a reliable way to compute the oxygen decrease during a round. It’s meant to be used side by side with the board game, either on a mobile or computer.

After 6 months of learning, this project is my first big, entirely personal project, and I’m very proud of it.

• Tech Stack
• Challenges
• Motivation
• Screenshots

Tech Stack

This tool has been developed in Ruby, as I’ve spent the past months learning programming through that language. I’ve applied an object-oriented design as it felt natural to segment the various elements into objects with an interface (Players, Round, etc.)

I’ve chosen to develop the website through the light-weight, Ruby domain-specific language Sinatra. Even though I’ve previously worked with Ruby on Rails, I preferred using a lighter library rather than a comprehensive framework that may hide away the complexity of web applications.

# Homepage
get '/' do
  erb :home
end

For instance, this Sinatra code snippet means that a GET request to the homepage (/) will trigger the loading of the ERB (embedded Ruby) template home.erb.

As the project grew in complexity, I’ve added a comprehensive test suite (with Minitest), in order to be able to safely refactor and prevent regressions.

Additionally, I taught myself to work with Bootstrap for this project. Being a complete beginner in front-end development, with no knowledge of JavaScript and only the very basics of CSS, this proved to be quite challenging.

However, I’m happy I went through that struggle because Bootstrap helped me build a smooth and user-friendly application (both on desktop and mobile).

I’ve deployed the application on Heroku, mostly because it’s a free hosting service. (The app is hosted onto an EU server, so US-based users might encounter some latency.)

Finally, I also took the opportunity to learn about Travis CI and set up my first continuous integration and automatic deployment, through Github > Travis CI > Heroku. As I was working alone on this project, this configuration probably is a luxury, but it’s never too early to learn the best practices.

Challenges

Through this project, I’ve faced two main challenges:

• I had to learn the basics of front-end and Bootstrap to go through it
• I wanted to build an application with no database and log-in system so instead, I extensively used session storage to persist user data

Why did I choose to steer clear of login and databases?

Mainly because I think that most users find it tiresome to go through a registration process for almost every Internet service. A “plug and play” approach is much nicer instead.

Plus, in this situation, using session storage worked pretty well because:

• Most games last less than 1 hour so sessions expiring was not a concern
• Even though several players could want to keep score, it feels acceptable that they use only one player’s device.

Motivation

I’ve chosen to build this app mostly because I like games but dislike arguing over a messy count score.

In Deep Sea Adventure, players dive into the deep ocean looking for treasures. All divers share the same oxygen tank, and each treasure picked up weighs down the diver and increases its oxygen intake. All divers must be back into the submarine before the oxygen tank becomes empty. As such, it is critical to accurately monitor the available oxygen. (More on the game’s rules)

However, experience shows that it can be difficult to accurately compute the available oxygen in a quick game setup, and that arguments over which player should have drowned tend to ruin the fun. This is where this Scoring App comes handy!

Screenshots