Well, Cory recently said in a podcast we can use it to mean "product got worse", so I've become less pedantic on this point fwiw. (I think it was in the episode of Adam Conover from about a month ago)
Fwiw, we're only using Discord for disposable communication. We have a docusaurus site up for the docs, and otherwise all the development is taking place on Github. Discord seems very popular with the board game crowd, so it was kind of the first place we went to try to reach gamers before we started reaching out to developers.
What do you prefer to discord for disposable communication? Certainly open to suggestions.
We were doing something more like merely recording the game moves and applying them to arrive at the game state (having deterministic per-session rng). It's a good way to do it, but for the same of simplicity, this time around we just record the whole json blob per move. It simplifies undos and it also lets us easily move through history if you want to view a previous state.
But I'd love to try to apply some of your lessons to a later version. The challenge for us now is making a good api for expressing board games. That's been really tricky tbh. We've been working on this for ~7 years and have gone through many iterations of this api trying to get it right. I sure hope we're closer this time.
The reason the server isn't in Python is because in boardzilla, you don't express your game twice, once for the client and once for the server. Instead, you express the game once in typescript, and that code is actually used on both the server and client. The client is operating a lot like the server, just without the hidden information.
The React aspects are really minimal, all the animation logic is by outside of React. We're really just using it for the jsx syntax to make it easier to return markup-looking components.
Hey Joemi. I wanted to make a self-hosted single game runner, but I haven't gotten to it yet. The interface used by the game/server is detailed here https://github.com/boardzilla/boardzilla-devtools/blob/main/... so it should be pretty easy to make this runner. I hope to get to it soon.
Totally agree, Asmodee has basically prevented a real competitor from entering the market. We have an idea in mind that doesn't involve going up against BGA, but instead looks at more smaller games from indie publishers. Not sure how viable that is, but not sure what else someone is supposed to do.