What follows is the stream-of-conciousness and research that lead up to our newest sample room!

tl;dr

• advanced adventures.
• sample-room-scala
• the room up and running

Day 0

So for me 2017/18 is going to include adventures in polyglot.

This will include but will not be only restricted to Kotlin,Prolog, Erlang, Racket, Haskell, Closure, Scala

Day 1

Decide on tooling.

• scala is the language.
• sbt is the build tool.
• giter8 to set up starter directories.
• play is the Websocket Framework.
• ensime is the plugin for emacs.
  • play has a web socket api
  • giter8 has a starter template for play.
• ensime looks fun as a development environment.

Learn to stop hating and love regexes

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scala> sample
res69: String =
roomHello,<roomId>,{
    "username": "username",
    "userId": "<userId>",
    "version": 1|2
}

scala> pattern
res70: scala.util.matching.Regex = (?s)(\w+),([^,]*),(.*)

scala> val pattern(target,id,payload) = sample
target: String = roomHello
id: String = <roomId>
payload: String =
{
    "username": "username",
    "userId": "<userId>",
    "version": 1|2
}

Game On! is a fun little text adventure written using a Microservice architecture. It's also extensible, allowing users to write their own ‘Rooms’ (locations within the text adventure world), that run as Microservices, in the cloud, on their own systems, etc.

I've played with Arduino's and Raspberry Pi's, and similar for quite some time. I tried having an Arduino read data from a Floppy Drive, which was fun, and ultimately led to a crazy floppy disk autoloader. From there, I ended up moving on from Arduino to the Maple, then from there to a Teensy 3.0, and most recently, a rather fun little collection of boards based around a Chip known as the ESP8266

There are some nice things about one of the ESP8266 boards I had (Witty Cloud / GizWits):

• you program it using the Arduino API,
• it has built in WiFi, 4MB of flash to store your code, 64k of instruction ram, and 96k of data ram to play with.
• it runs at 80mhz or so
• it has an LED light that can change color
• it has a light sensor

That's pretty impressive for something that costs around 5$ shipped.

When you know there are Arduino JSON libraries, and Arduino WebSocket libraries that can run on it, you start wondering: is it possible to host a Room for Game On on an ESP8266 ?

I had a spare moment at a weekend, so decided to find out! =)