First game played against another real person!!

My wonderful friend volunteered to test-play my game!  I happily report that everything worked as it should, and we were able to play the game as fully as possible given the state of the code.  (Some things are missing, including: losing a turn when you're out of bounds, detection of a player winning the game, detection of a player going off the edge of the grid entirely -- this last issue did not come up in our game, but it's rather important to make sure I can handle that somehow.)

First I'll post a screenshot of our finished game.  I'm the blue player and my friend is the red.

Following the screenshot, I'm including a transcript of our chat conversation during the game (with my friend's permission, and mildly edited for relevance).  It's very helpful to know his thoughts during gameplay, particularly in the areas of: the rules of play, interaction with the interface, and information to be displayed during gameplay.

Our game:

Chat transcript:

me: alright let me instruct you what to do
friend: ok
me: you're still on the page?
friend: absolutely
me: ok refresh it
me: and you should see "game #20" on available games to start
friend: yeah click it?
me: i mean to join
me: yes
me: ok i can see tha tyou joined lol
friend: i'm in baby
me: now does the track show up?
friend: yes
me: alright it's my turn lol
me: i'm blue and your'e red
friend: how do i move it?
me: you have to wait for me to go first
me: i'm player 0
friend: ok
me: you're player 1
me: cuz i started this particular game
friend: ok
me: do you see my move?
friend: you moved up one space
friend: yeah
me: yes
me: now you can click any of the red circles to move there
me: we're trying to go around the track. lol
friend: i gotcha
me: so that's all... lol
friend: can we occupy the same space?
me: not at the same time
friend: ooh
friend: intersting
me: but you can only select from the circles to move to
friend: can i go right on top of the inner black line?
me: they show you where you can move based on the rules
me: yeah that should work
friend: ok
friend: your move
me: yes i know
me: i'm trying to explain lol
friend: hehe
me: cu zi realized you don't know the rules
me: but yeah it's pretty simple
friend: i gotcha
friend: oh now we can move two spaces up
me: the rule is
me: on each turn, you can change your x speed by -1, 0, or 1
me: and same for y speed
me: make sense?
me: so try not to go out of bounds
friend: so how do i change the speed?
me: you are changing it by selecting one of the option circles
friend: ahhh i see
me: middle circle = no change
friend: i getcha
friend: like a turn-based game
me: all the others are a change of some kind, in one or both directions
me: it is turn based yes lol
friend: i dont see why it's letting you take the inside route
friend: and why the spaces closest to the edge wasnt available to me
me: you always have an x/y speed.
me: like i said
me: in each turn you can change one or both of those by: -1, 0, 2 for each
me: but the game is doing the work of tracking your speed and available changes by showing you the options for your move
me: that's all haha
friend: ok fine
me: do you understand it?
friend: for now
me: you manage your acceleration
me: so you should start slowing down in the x-direction
friend: so what's the advantage of a slowing down
me: lol....
me: if you keep going so fast in x-direction
me: you won't be able to stay inside
friend: i getcha
me: b/c you can only slow down by 1 each turn
friend: ahhh ook ok
friend: play on
me: oh shit
me: lol i'm out of bounds hahha
me: right now i don't actually have any implementation for handling that case.
friend: so what does that mean, game over for you/i win?
me: no
me: i haven't coded this part yet
friend: oh ok
friend: so it's stuck
me: but when yor'e out of bounds you lose every other turn
me: so you get slowed down a lot in comparison to the other players
me: no it's not stuck i can just move normally haha
me: see the upper right, the game knows i'm out of bounds
friend: oh ok
me: but it's not going to do anything about it
me: sorry haha i'm technically cheating right now
friend: ahh i see
friend: ok i'm trying to go more down and less righgt
me: mhm
friend: so was that the right move to make
me: yeah that's the right strategy for the moment
me: but don't go flying downwards too fast
me: cuz you will have to slow down again
friend: cause i gotta make the turn
me: it's acutally harder than it looks lol
friend: i go tit,
me: yay
friend: lets see if i can do it
friend: haha
me: dude, you have no idea, i'm so excited right now
friend: ok so one thing
friend: i gotta start goign left
friend: how do i tell it to do that
me: you can't "tell" it to do anything
friend: right
me: you can just choose from the options
me: you'll see
friend: well how do i change my velocity
friend: to go -x
me: it'll just do it for you
friend: based on what
me: as long as you are selecting one of the left-hand-column circles to move to, you're changing your horizontal speed by -1 each time
friend: ah haa
me: just keep clicking lol
friend: ok
me: now your'e out
me: of bounds
me: but you can keep playing like i did lol
friend: yeah
friend: didnt have much of an option
me: see you are going -x now
friend: yeah i see
me: but now watch the inside bound
friend: it's just
friend: reactive
me: haha
me: it's like driving
friend: how do i know what my current "x" is
me: right now you have to count it, sorry
me: i'll make a display for that
friend: haha ok
friend: that's the only thing
friend: keeping track
me: yeahh sorry!
friend: shoulda slowed my Y a bit sooner
me: lol, yeah
me: oh and please try not to go off the board
me: i don't have anything to deal with that right now in the code lol
friend: i'm working on it
friend: but i kidna dont remember how much -Y i put in
me: you can count from your previous dot to your X now
friend: oh forget that
me: okay...
me: crap i might go out
friend: hee
me: i didn't slow x early enough
friend: you nooob
me: right sure.
me: yeah shit
me: haha i'm flyyying off the track there.
friend: hahah
me: you should aslo slow x now
me: by the way it's not goign to detect the winner..
friend: yeah i finally see the x slowing
me: ok i'm gonna stop there ok?
friend: ok so you won then
me: well i was out of bounds so
me: who knows haha
me: hey
me: can i ask you a huge favor
friend:
so it's supposed to skip yoru turn
friend: but it seem like it didnt
me: i know, i told you i didn't code the turn-losing yet
friend: oh ok
me: yeah..
friend: sorry osrry
me: lol it's ok
friend: just trying to get it striaght
friend: ok huge favor
friend: go ahead
me: yeah def.
me: so would you mind if i posted (most of) this conversation with you on my project blog?
friend: sure
me: this is the first time i've played wiht someone else on another computer.
me: i won't put your name
friend: just, know that i'm not educated
friend: haha
me: lol,
me: i like our conversation b/c you pointed out stuff that would be confusing to someone who's never played before
me: which are things i should consider when i write the instructions, etc
friend: ah i see

me: thank you soo much!

Found my game on BoardGameGeek!!

Joe suggested I try to find and scan an old piece of paper on which my dad and I had played the game.  I'll probably try to do that, but in the meantime, I found a listing for the game under the name "Racetrack" on boardgamegeek.com.  There are also some user-submitted photos.  My favorites...

(click the images to see them in full size)

(source)

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Love the comments... The caption on the page says this one is from the 1960s!

Backlogged Intro Post

Well, hello world.  Just figured I should get a post up on here and record a bit of how this experience is getting started.

My idea for this project came to me out of relatively nowhere during a long and stressful thought process and discussion about potential senior projects on a car ride with my parents.  I have memories of playing with my father a paper-and-pencil game to which he always referred as "Trace Race".  To over-generalize, I realized that the game - being simple yet challenging and thus engaging - could be translated to an online version in the form of a Facebook application, and through such a project I would gain a great variety of experience in technologies in which I am interested.

I don't want to reiterate my entire proposal document here (as I stressed out enough already while writing it) so I will just post a couple of links...

Here is the Wikipedia article which explains the basic premise of the gameplay.  I will be emulating the exact version I always played with my father, so a few specifics here and there may differ.

This Checkers application is an example of a turn-based game on Facebook which I find to have a simple, clean, effective, and attractive design (all of which are characteristics I want to achieve in my game).  One interesting difference it has from my plan is that it the board and pieces are not made in Flash (as I plan to do), but rather are apparently just well-positioned images.  In the case of this game, it works; I'm not sure about relative efficiency, but based on my HTML knowledge I don't think it would work for my game.

The one element that particularly worries me because it is a hole in my knowledge is how to implement the concurrent multiplayer experience I want.  Whereas with most of the rest of the project I have pieces of experience such that I'm pretty confident I can pull together what I want to do (aside of perhaps the Flash/Actionscript...), I have never before tried to figure out how an update or action of some sort by one user can automatically be pushed through to show up on other concurrent users' screens.  The only thing that comes to mind is to poll a database at some constant [very short] interval to look for a change which will then be pushed to the front end.  This seems rather inefficient...  So, to prove to myself that fast multiuser Flash gameplay was totally possible, I looked for an example and found this game called Guess the Sketch Challenge which is really just online Pictionary.

This is a brief informal introduction to my idea and inspiration.  I will post a version of my abstract soon, at Joe's request.