LARPUN

LARP Using Node

This project is designed to facilitate LARP Downtimes. For those unfamilliar with it, LARP (Live Action Role-Play), is a form of game in which a group of people engage in immersive roleplay within a set of rules.

Downtimes are traditionally run between play sessions, and are used to progress time and describe what your character is doing in the weeks or months that separate play sessions. This takes many forms, usually a mixture of heavily systemic actions, those fully defined in rules, and more freeform actions, both of which are submitted to referees, processed, and responded to.

This project aims to aid in this process by automating the simpler actions and their effects upon character attributes, as well as the simpler aspects (such as time costs) of more complex actions.

This project showcases primarily the "player" side of that interaction, and currently has no "referee" frontend, however given that user emails are stored and character sheets are fairly easy to understand and modify, it is still useable as either part or the entirety of a Downtime system.

This project is live at https://larpun.herokuapp.com/, however due to character information being stored locally, it is not reccomended that you use it while also using the local version, as they both use the same remote user authentication and signup, but store characters locally, which can cause issues if you try and login online to a user created locally, or vice versa.

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Website Guide

The website itself is very easy to use, it consists entirely of only two pages, described as follows:

• Login/Signup:
  This page contains two forms, one for creating a new user and character, and the other for logging in as an existing user.
  -The "New Character" form requires an email, a character name, and a password. Pressing submit will validate the form and provide an alert stating either success, or giving the reason why the user creation failed (eg, user with that email already exists)
  -The "Login" form simply requires an email and password that has already been registered as a character. Pressing submit will validate the form, perform a login action, and, if successful, reroute the user to the User Page

• User Page:
  This page contains several elements.
  -At the top a "Character Info" block exists providing the key attributes of the character
  -Beneath this sits a "Basic Actions" block, this provides a number of buttons with descriptions, each button performs a certain basic action that has effects on the character attributes. Pressing this button will either perform the action and update the attributes both on the server and on the page, or if there are not enough resources of the action has failed for another reason, an alert will appear with the reason
  -The "Complex Actions" block contains two text input boxes, each with a submit button. Filling in the input boxes and pressing submit will submit that text and put it into the relevant character sheet on the server.
  -Finally a small user guide is placed at the bottom with a more basic version of this guide.

API Documentation

The API for this project is designed to be used in conjunction with the website, but could be used independently.

In order to use any of the other API calls, a SessionID and UserID must be generated. The UserID is permanent for a specific User, but the SessionID will only last for a few hours.

In order to generate this information, a POST request must be made to /login, with a data block containing "email" and "password" attributes in the multipart/form-data format.
If the authentication details exist, the response with a JSON object containing sessionID and userID objects, which should be stored locally.
If the details are incorrect, the response will be sent with status code 401: Forbidden

Characters are stored as JSON objects on the server, containing the following attributes:

• Name [String]
• ProgressionPoints [Int]
• TimeUnitsMax [Int]
• TimeUnitsCurrent[Int]
• ResearchPoints [Int]
• PreparedMana[Int]
• ResearchActions [Array of Strings]
• InvestigationActions [Array of Strings]

Further API endpoints are listed below:

• /char/:sessionID
  Replace ":sessionID" with your sessionID. This also serves as session confirmation.
  On success: Returns Status Code 200 with a JSON object containing the Character Sheet as a JSON object.
  On failure: Returns Status code 400 with an error message

• /updatevalues/:userID
  Replace ":userID" with your userID. In body send a JSON object containing an updated version of the Character Sheet, which will replace the original.
  Always: Returns Status Code 200

• /signup
  In body send an object containing email, password and charname attributes. A new user and character will be created with these attributes.
  On success: Returns Status Code 201 with "Creation Successful" message
  On failure: Returns Status Code 422 with an error message

• /userpage
  Always: Returns HTML for User Page

• /pingtest
  Always: Returns Status Code 200

Extensions:

Both extensions are fulfilled with cloud deployment to Heroku and integration with the OKTA remote authentication web service.