Playing with HTML5/JavaScript features that enable single page web applications, server sent events, web sockets, WebRTC data channels, and touch/mouse gesture browser UI.

On Heroku: http://findgame.herokuapp.com

The game matchmaking piece is a single page web application backed by a RESTful web service in NodeJS. It uses server sent events to refresh the lists of games and players.

The game itself uses WebRTC data channels; Socket.io is only used as a signalling server. Once signalling is complete, the game is run as a fully peer-to-peer mesh network with a shared game state (the server can go down and the game is unaffected). The game UI uses HammerJS for touch/mouse gestures.

Prototype design:
- Single page web application
- NodeJS web service with SSE for matchmaking
- Socket.io web sockets for signalling
- WebRTC data channels for shared game state
- HammerJS for gestures

If I were actually designing this functionality instead of prototyping/playing with technologies, I would consider one of the two options listed below.

Server-heavy design:
- Single page web application
- Web sockets for matchmaking, signalling, and shared game state

Server-light design:
- Single page web application
- Web sockets for signalling
- WebRTC data channels for matchmaking and shared game state

Either of these designs would also include a key feature missing from the prototype: player chat. This would be trivial to do with either web sockets or WebRTC data channels (in fact, I removed it from the game prototype since it made the user experience on mobile too complicated).

Other key pieces of functionality missing:
- Persistent player login instead of allowing multiple uses of the same name - implemented similar to https://github.com/srpeck/unlocks
- Redis for in-memory shared state across multiple servers