Buzzzah

A simple game server that allows participants to join teams and "buzz in". I built this to facilitate trivia matches I host for my team. Because these are hosted via Zoom, it was always difficult to discern who "buzzed in" first, second, third ... So I built buzzzah (buzzer spelled with a Boston accent), which can be used to help facilitate running a game (not provided) that requires users to buzz in.

Buzzzah.Demo.mov

Installation

You'll need to install Go.

go install github.com/pkazmier/buzzzah@latest

Start a game

To start the server, you must specify the address and port to listen on as well as the name of the team that hosts will join (you can have more than one host). The host's web client will provide the ability to reset the buzzers and edit the scoreboard.

buzzzah 0.0.0.0:8080 HostTeam

To join the game, participants and hosts should point their browsers to the address provided above. They will be prompted for a name that will be used to identify their bubble in the UI as well as a team name to which they are attached. Hosts should join the special team name passed when starting up the server.

Users can then press the "Buzz In" to signify they wish to buzz in. As each user buzzes in, the UI is reflected to show the order in which users buzzed in via a numeral next to their name as well as the size of the bubble. The largest bubble is the first person to buzz in.

Hosts can then press the "Reset Buzzers" to reset the state of the users' buzzers and to get ready for the next round. In addition, hosts can directly edit the scoreboard table, which will then update all of the users scoreboards.

Credit

Both the client and server are based on the chat server example in nhooyr's excellent Go websocket package.

I used the wonderful D3 library to build the web UI.