Building my first game, the Hearts tutorial

[lunaroctopi]

Hi all,

I'm excited to find this community because I love playing board games. As a developer, I have been doing web dev a little over a year - I have done multiple projects built with MERN stack.

I'm excited to start working on the Hearts tutorial as my first board game project because I used to play MS Hearts on my parent's windows 3.1 PC as a kid. Have made interactive apps before but never a game. I'd guess I will grasp the JS instructions quickly, but I actually don't know PHP at all, and I have done a 3 hour SQL tutorial, so I hope the tutorial is beginner-friendly on the back end. If anyone has advice for this beginner, I'd love to hear it.

Nice to meet you all, hope to get to know this community better soon.

Dan

[Lymon Flowers]

Read the doc.

Get the source code of projects and see how they resolved issues. Also, read the doc.

Make double sure you really understand how notifications, states (with argument functions and action functions), actions, ajax calls and results work. And read the doc.

Experiment with the setup JS function, you need to guarantee that players can hit reload ANYTIME and get a consistent interface. And don't forget to read the docs.

Did I say, read the docs?

Ok, that sounds soooooo RTFM, but really, I lost quite some time because I failed to read the docs correctly and understand subtle nuances of the framework.

Other than that, if you have graphics and sprites, make sure your graphic toolchain allows you to change things easily, because you WILL reposition tokens on your board, change resolution, move sprites, add tokens, change colors, etc. In Downforce, it really saved me pain to write scripts that parsed SVG files and converted them into arrays of coordinates, in turn fed to the JS of the interface. By editing the SVG scripts, I could easily move tokens and adjust the board so that everything would fit as expected.

[tchobello]

Hi

perhaps you should start with Reversi first.
Hearts uses a lot Deck ans Stock components and that can be 'too much' for a first project.

[Draasill]

Welcome

You won't have much problem, coming from MERN, I guess.

PHP is quite easy, although sometimes you'll probably encounter some problems.

As bdrieu said, read the docs, but above all, read some source code examples (there are some on github : https://github.com/topics/boardgamearena).

And finally, you can come chat and get help on the developer discord forum (link in "other resources" on the main studio page).

Have fun !

[Hornir91]

Hello.

I would suggest to do Hearts and Gomoku, because from Hearts you will learn how to use Deck and Stock classes and from Gomoku you will get the second approach of creating a game on BGA .