Shared Game Timer
A board game timer synchronized across multiple devices.
My board game group uses timers, and I was annoyed that none of them worked across multiple devices. So I made my own.
Finished my guide for creating a Clue-based remote control. Love this little device! So versatile and pretty! Check out the guide and the intro video at https://sharedgametimer.com/guides/clue .
What I love the most about it is that you can turn it upside-down to enter Admin Time, or face-down to pause the game. Just a neat little usability thing.
Some game creators on online platforms like Tabletopia wanted a way to customize links that sets up all the timer settings appropriate to their game. So, I made a URL endpoint that take all the different settings into consideration and allows for these template links. Works great!
One more timer mode, this time a simple sand timer that is shared between all players. Anyone can start/stop/reset the sand timer.
This was requested by a user and I didn't really see the need for it myself, but I've seen plenty of people use it, so guess I was wrong! :-)
Big feature! Count-Down mode! Before, the timer was always counting up. But now, you can set it to count down! And of course, I made it extremely customizable. So, you can set a starting Time Bank. You can set a time Increment to the Bank at the start of each turn or round, also known as a Fischer time increment. And you can set a Delay time at the start of each turn or round, during which the time bank doesn't count down. (aka Bronstein delay).
The difference between the increment and delay is that unused increment time is carried forward while unused delay time is lost.
I did it! I didn't think I was going to make it work, but it does! I've successfully moved ALL the firebase libraries and code over to a web worker! This frees up the UI thread to do other things, leading to a significant first load improvement.
This is all technical and no new feature came out of it. But honestly, I don't see ANYONE having done this. Maybe I should write a guide on it.
OMG! This is so exciting! After a lot of work, I now have ways to control the shared game timer using four types of remote controls. The two coolest ones are Gamepads and Bluetooth devices!
Gamepads is pretty straight forward, map buttons to actions. Done.
Bluetooth is more subtle! You can ask SGT to send text commands to the Bluetooth device e.g. the current player color, to set e.g. a strip of LEDs to the current player color. Or you can have the remove control send SGT messages, like 'Button A pressed' and use it as a remote control. The possibilities are endless! Web Bluetooth rocks!
I got the Shared Game Timer live on the Google Play store today! Woop! I did it by wrapping my PWA as a TWA (Trusted Web App) and the deploy was super smooth. The good thing now is that whenever I update the PWA, the TWA is automatically updated too! Never any old versions hang around. sweet.
Added a customizable scoresheet at the end of a game. Players can add whatever scoring lines as they wish, and even add formulas like 'x/10', useful for games that have end-game scoring like 'your money divided by 10, rounded down'. If a score line match the tracked VP or money, it is automatically moved over.
And of course, it can be filled out simultaneously.
More scope creep! Yes, I should be marketing it, and instead, I'm creating new big features... But, I figured that with COVID still around, people will be playing a lot of online board games, and if I can provide a killer feature specifically for them, then great!
So, the Shared Game Timer can now track VP and Money using the app. Around a table IRL you would never want to lose the tactile feel of the tokens, but online it is often more a nuisance. And wait, there's more! You can put in mathematical formulas like 5*8 , and the timer will figure out the result, AND display the formulas next to the amount in the logs so players can double-check that everyone is doing the right thing. Awesome!
I'm working myself closer to launch! And for it, I need a kickass explainer video! And I have never made anything like it before so of course I have to learn it all from scratch.
I'm slowly getting there. I went with a pretty weird route, making it in Sozi It is a SVG animating broken-out extension to Inkscape. The good thing about it is that I can script it with Javascript to make it do stuff.