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White Elephant

A gift exchange game where players can steal gifts from each other. Also known as Yankee Swap or Dirty Santa. The production version of the game is here.

Development

This is a rough prototype, so has no tests and could benefit from some restructuring. My aim with this project was to get something usable working in a short time while learning about browser-to-browser communication, rather than focusing on maintainablity. If this becomes useful longer term, it may need more attention.

Architecture

White Elephant is a peer-to-peer React and Redux app built on top of WebRTC using PeerJS. It also uses a simple PeerJS server to broker initial communications between peers (browsers), but all other information is sent directly from peer to peer.

To simplify the communication and to ensure a single source of truth for data, one browser hosts the game and other browsers connect just with the host. A subset of Redux actions are then sent from player browsers to the host. The host then broadcasts the actions to all other players, ensuring all browsers are in sync.

This app was built using create-react-app.

Why use peer-to-peer data transfer?

Several reasons:

  • I'm interested in exploring peer-to-peer communication
  • It's cheap - no need to pay for many servers
  • It's scalable - computation is almost entirely client-side, and clients interact in small groups, while servers need to deal with all clients

Downsides:

  • Image handling is awkward - permanent storage is difficult (so I avoided it)
  • Users cannot join games unless the host is online, so game setup is slow

Local development

To start the local server run:

make start_dev_Derver

Then, in a separate terminal, run the following to start the client:

make start

This will open a new browser tab pointing at your local client code. If you make a change to code, the changes should be automatically reflected in the browser. Any state saved in hooks will not be lost.

Local development of peer-to-peer features requires multiple browsers, or at least a browser in private browsing mode in addition to a normal browser.

Deployment

The client is hosted on S3 behind Cloudflare at https://white-elephant.djpdev.com/. To deploy an update, run:

ENVIRONMENT=production make deploy

The server rarely changes and could easily be replaced with any other PeerJS server. To deploy it, first ensure you have access to the heroku account for the server, then run:

make deploy_server