Kuhhandel

The Animal Auction Game

This project is a web implementation of the game Kuhhandel. The larger goal in building this project was to create a framework-free program that relied primarily on the Python standard library. This game in particular interested me for the challenge posed by managing an asynchronous auction, and offered a chance to work on a project incorporating websockets and asyncio. There is a rather austere front end client for basic testing and use, however the primary focus of this project has been the server side code.

Setup

The game can be played on web browsers by running the server and opening client/index.html in three tabs (or potentially on three web browsers across a local network). Dummy players can also be set up by running the three auto_player_....py files in test_clients -- starting the server followed by those three auto_players will run the game to completion.

Running the server and opening the clients (Mac)

• Clone the project and navigate into project directory in terminal
• Create a new virtual environment by running python3 -m venv env in the root directory (first time only)
• Start virtual environment with source env/bin/activate
• Install project dependency with pip install -r requirements.txt (also first time only)
• Start the server with python server.py
• Open the client/index.html file in three separate tabs of a web browser, and the game will start after the third connects.

Running the tests

The unittests of this project can be tested by running the following command in the project's root directory: python3 -m unittest. In addition, the game can be run end-to-end by starting the server and running the following three commands from the root project directory in three separate terminal tabs (after starting the virtual environment in each tab):

• python test_clients/auto_player_one.py
• python test_clients/auto_player_two.py
• python test_clients/auto_player_three.py For testing, it is convenient to set the auction timeout to as low as possible - something like 0.001 seconds works well. The auction timeout is passed in as a parameter when the game object is initialized, in server.py, and defaults to 15 seconds.