1.5.4: Mistake button and removal of state data

Features

• new mistake button that doesn't count towards the team count. Just shows an overlay to indicate a mistake.
• new mistake overlay triggers on team mistake.
• mistake sound is played on buzzer screen as well as game screen.
  
• new button to reset team mistakes if needed
  

Fixes

• json games have been removed of "state" data and cleaned up.

Load Game via .csv

Features:

• You now can load a game via file in .csv format.

Expects format: Question, Answer, Points (number), Answer, Points (number) ... There are examples in csv/ folder in the repo. Limit is 30 rows for now.

• You can interactively pick how many rounds and final rounds come from your data
• Added a kubernetes helm/ chart

Fixes:

• File dialog clear the value so repeated selections of the same file works.
• https://famf.app is hosted on a stable server instead of a free tier of render.com. This should fix random resets of game and the site is more performant.
• New site https://dev.famf.app is available for testing in progress features

1.5.1 Custom logos, Themes for games 🎨

Upload a custom logo

• Added a feature to be able to upload a <2MB (.jpeg, .png, .gif) image to be displayed for the title of the game
  

Theme selector

• Added a feature and did the css work to have a theme selector for the game

• Default
  

• Dark
  

• Slate
  

1.4.1 New admin settings + fast money more rounds

New admin settings

• Now round questions are hidden by default and the admin can choose to hide or reveal the questions during the game

• Admin can change the score multiplier during the game

Fast money Can be any amount of rounds

• Game creator allows you to create as many fast money rounds as wanted.

1.4.0 More UI enhancements, improvementts

Lots of works on making each page responsive on both mobile and desktop:

• admin console in a desktop size now gets sized down to about half for ease of use:
  
• final round on mobile looks nice now
  
  (desktop)
  
• on the buzzer screen if the width is small enough, multiple text instances get overflowed ellipses properly
  

refactored final.js for simplicity:

• I no longer create a copy of data for the 2nd final round and instead just create the 2nd final round in data when you load a game. This allowed me to cut out lots of lines from final.js

Create meta description content in the head for search engines

I decided to do this instead of putting a bunch of description content on the front page. I like the clean look it currently has and with the description head tag new users could still find the game by searching for free family feud game

Title logo now does its best job to resize the text and make everything fit within the svg view port instead of cutting it off.

(it can get pretty ugly, but I prefer ugly to hidden 😀)

What's Changed

• Add 2 more christmas themed games by @JBaczuk in #45
• fix christmas 2 questions by @JBaczuk in #47
• dont hide final round hidden total from 2nd round by @joshzcold in #51
• Lots of UI Enhancements accross the site. Focusing on mobile-desktop full compatibility by @joshzcold in #53

New Contributors

• @JBaczuk made their first contribution in #45

Full Changelog: 1.3.3...1.4.0

Websocket stability and easier translation

• client no longer connects to server unless joining or hosting a game. previously it would connect on page load
• websocket gets re-connected on host or join if the websocket state is not OPEN
• better i18n key names to allow for easier translating. "helpText": "..." -> "this is what the help text should be": "..." . In english this displays properly if the key is missing in translation.json. When translating a language the translator no longer needs to search and find out what helpText means.
• login page is a seperate component to prepare for more content coming to the landing page (like instructions and SEO content)

1.3.2 Mobile UI Improvements Everywhere

UI Improvements

After this release you should be able to host a full family feud game just on mobile on https://famf.app

Although you would be missing some sound effects from the game window you won't have to break out the laptop to share your screen to play.

Admin Console

Everything is sized up for mobile. Controls are moved around for better ux

Buzzer Screen

I shoved the full game window components onto the mobile buzzer screen

Fast money also appears on the buzzer screen for all players.

Game window

• If no text is inputted for the title text then a normal logo is displayed.
• room code is shown on title screen
  

Published Website

Cold-Family-Feud is now available at https://famf.app !

It is currently using the free tier of heroku so if you are accessing it then you might have to wait a second for the app to become un-suspended before it loads up.

Changes:

• websockets run through secure wss and the local dev envrionment has some self signed certs to make them functional
• new default games season20 (general questions from the show) and tech (custom game featuring tech questions)
• new script scripts/point_generator which can generate realistic point values givin a question amount along with min/max point values. requires ruby

This is useful when creating your own questions and you don't want to come up with point values off the top of your head.

• game creator now allows skipping creating the fast money round.
• created license (MIT)
• websockets get served at a path instead of a dedicated port. This is to allow the websockets to function in production

Getting the website published was a painful process, but now that its finished im excited for the potential of non-tech individuals being able to use the project. For instance my mother in law already want to try and use it for her classroom. I think thats pretty cool 😀.

I currently don't know the limits of the free tier on heroku when used against this project. Hopefully its enough for the foreseeable future as people stumble upon this project and try a quick game.

For the next releases ill be focusing on play-ability improvements using mobile. Off the bat I would like if you didn't have to screen share the game window to be able to play the game.

Rooms 🚪

Features

• Game session is kept in a cookie. if you refresh your browser it should bring you back into the game where you left off

• Home page has routes to either join a game or host a game
  

• game window is launched from the admin console "Open Game Window". Uses cookie to find room and display the game

• host can quit the game. kicking everyone out of the game

• individual players can quit the game

• Registered players in a room are now listed on the admin console and can be kicked
  

Launching a Public Instance

I believe this feature is one of the last features before I could launch this app in a public instance. This would be great for people looking to play the game but who do not have experience in web dev or who wants to just host on a non dev machine.

Ill be doing some research, but obviously what I would like to avoid is having the cost of the server be too much for me to handle if I want the game to stay free (not sure if anyone would actually pay for the game anyways).

Ill be experimenting with AWS/Azure free tier, but I have heard some horror stories about cost being unexpectedly high if you make mistakes. If anyone has any ideas or past experiences that they would like to share I would be very grateful.

Also ill need to consider swapping out any "Family Feud" related trademarks/media with non copyrighted versions. I would like to avoid changing the name if I could get away with keeping "Family Feud" kind of like how https://jeopardylabs.com/ uses "Jeopardy".

Overall i'm not looking to make money off Cold_Family_Feud, but would like this project to be the best/easiest way to host your own family feud game.

Thanks for reading.

Potential Caveats:

• I never found a good way to test out rooms at scale. So any local testing I did what with at max 1 host, 2-3 players. I do plan on trying to play this game at my job with my coworkers which would at least do a 60 player test.
• With only 4 characters there is a maximum of 456976 possible rooms. The room code is found randomly in a loop. By time that this limit ever becomes a problem hopefully I would have found a way to monetize this app so I can code in more infrastructure to handle this (much like with what the jackbox games team has to do for their game). It would be better to make the room code generator go in order alphabetically rather than at random.

1.2.1 Small fixes/improvements

• fixed some language strings
• "Reveal First Round Answers" in final round no longer changes the box sizes on the game window
  
• file picker is a user friendly icon rather than default html file input
  
• default game selector for each language
• Team mistakes no longer can overlap