Rattle: multiplayer code battles to have fun while learning Rust

🎮 How the game works

The game assumes at least 2 players are online and ready to play. Following this:

1. A player chooses an exercise and gets matched to the other available player.
2. For each player, a websocket connection is established between their browser and the server.
3. Players are prompted with a fun text giving context to the exercise and have a limited amount of time to submit a solution. The amount of time depends on the player mode they're in, for e.g. Blitz Mode, Extended Play Mode and Collaborative Mode. Each exercise is Rust code that doesn't pass a set of tests. Players must fix the code so that it passes the tests.
4. Once a timer starts, players must submit a solution before the timer runs out. The player whose code passes the tests wins that round.

🦀 Architecture

A VueJS frontend communicates with an Iron backend, originally from the Rust Playground. Docker containers are used to provide the various compilers and tools as well as to help isolate them.

💡 Logic

A "game" or exercise is really just a lib.rs file which contains unfinished code; a test.rs file used to ensure the submitted code compiles as expected and a config.json file to store information about each exercise and useful metadata for the front-end.

When a player hits "Submit", their code gets sent to the server and appended to the tests for that exercise.

A player is only successful if they submit code that passes the tests. The compiler will run in test mode to ensure this.

📺 Future

// Talk about gaming to build out bigger projects collaboratively; multiple matches can be played at once; 
// bringing in web3 login to prove progress with NFTs; improving UX etc.

todo!()

🤖 Development

Build and serve the UI on port 8080

cd frontend
npm i
npm run serve

Build and run the server on port 5000

cd gamemaster
cargo run

There are some optional configuration parameters which you may set in a .env file. The server will run with no configuration, but in order to load and save gists a GitHub token must be configured.

You'll also need to be running a Docker container in the background.

🧑‍💻 Resource limits

Network

There is no network connection between the compiler container and the outside world.

Memory

The amount of memory the compiler and resulting executable use is limited by the container.

Execution Time

The total compilation and execution time is limited by the container.

Disk

This sandbox does not provide any disk space limits. It is suggested to run the server such that the temp directory is space-limited. One bad actor may fill up this shared space, but it should be cleaned when that request ends.

Acknowledgements

This project is inspired by:

• Rustlings
• Rust Playground
• Online Chess Games

License

Licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0).