ChesSMS

Inspiration

What it does

• Set up the game on a large screen.
• People can text the column of where the disc should be dropped for the connect 4.
• The column with the highest vote will have the new disc added.

- We used Twilio to receive texts in the backend

• Parse the texts
• Fire pusher events to add the vote to our graph
• Wait for the timer to go to 0, send a GET request to the backend server
• Raise another pusher event to update the game board with the colour and column of disc

How we built it

• We used a windows 2016 server as our backend which hosts the twilio end point
• It is also the backend server for firing the Pusher events via the PHP SDK
• The rest is front end which.
• We wrote our own custom game in Javascript and HTML and CSS
• Integrate it all together (nightmarish)

Challenges we ran into

• Latency issues with SMS when working on a real time game
• Integrating Pusher with is perfectly real time with twilio which has some latency

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Write our own, custom connect 4 game in Javascript
• Integrate several backend APIs ( Pusher, TwilioAWS, AWS and Google cloud) together.
• ^ Get the above to work SEAMLESSLY

What we learned

• We learnt about using Twilio and Pusher APIs.
• Learnt about real time software.
• Front and backend development and how much of a pain it is to integrate several backend components.

What's next for ChesSMS

Improve the user interaction capabilities by adding the ability to make a movie by voice. We are thinking of using Alexa to set up the game and make the move.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• google-compute-engine
• pusher
• twilio