Figure 1. A game lobby example!

Welcome to the development blog for Terminal Consequences! This is a game idea that I'm working on and its currently up and running on a free (please excuse the load time) web service. I have a love for typing and using the command line while working, and it lead to the idea of developing a website that acts as a terminal. The idea mutated futher into a cooperative, text-based, mystery game. Inspired by board games like Betrayal at the House on the Hill and Cluedo. As of now, it is in very early stages, and only a rudementary chatroom is actually implemented.

You can click here to test it out. Hint: Type help to get started.

The general idea is to have user registered in a database and able to chat in a general chatroom. From there, users can create a game lobby, and invite other users to join their game. The users can then start a story together and roleplay as their characters. At the start of the game a murder takes place. It's up to the characters to investigate.

Architecture

The web application is written in javascript with Node.js and Express. For real time communication, the Socket.IO libary is used.

For the user database and chatroom history, mySql is used. The database is hosted on another free service. Hopefully i remember to to click the reactivation link every week...

The terminal interface is provided with an open source library called jquery-terminal . The library provides the oppertunity to define commands and some cool terminal features like command history and tab-autocomplete.

I've had tons of fun planning and coding on the project so far. It is very enjoyable to see when the server, client and database all works together. Hopefully I'll add more features soon, and actually implement a working game. All the code is available on github.

Figure 2. The general chatroom.