Running the application

Development Mode

Clone or download the project to your local drive

On your command line, change directory to the project location

Run the command npm install to install necessary node_modules

Run the command npm start. This will run the app in the development mode

Open http://localhost:3000 to view the game in the browser.

Application Design

Technology Overview

This application utilizes React as a SPA platform

No CSS Bootstrap has been used. All styling has been done with pure CSS/ SCC grid/ SASS

React Hooks have been used for local state management and lifecycle methods

Basic form validation for player names form, with customized error messages

Components Structure

The application consists of 10 different components structured as follows:

<App /> Containing the whole application

<Header /> Visible at all times

<PlayersSelect />If visible, Game and Result components will not be visible. This will allow players to assign their names

<Game /> If visible, PlayerSelect and Result components will not be visible

<Score /> Displays the score

<Messages /> Displays a message describing who is playing

<Cards /> The game boards. It saps a cards array and displays them on the board

<Card /> Displays individual representation of each element in a cards array

<Result /> If visible, PlayersSelect and Game components will not be visible. Shows who won the game, and gives the players an option to replay

<Score /> Displays the score (example for components reuse)

<Footer /> Visible at all times

Design Logic

Toggling between PlayersSelect, Game and Result Components

Only one of these components will be visible at a time. Toggling between them is done through two Booleans created within the state of '<App /> component. These two variables are called gameOver and startGame. Conditions for viewing these components are as follows
- <PlayersSelect /> is displayed whengameOver = false, startGame = false
- <Game /> is displayed whengameOver = false, startGame = true
- <Result /> is displayed whengameOver = true, startGame = true

Cards array, creating the card deck and shuffling it

• A base Array of cards has been created in an external file cards-array.js to keep the code cleaner. The array is an array of objects with 3 keys for each card: id, image and name. For images, svg icons have been used for better styling.

• A useEffect method in the <App /> component concatenates two copies of the cards array, and calls a shuffle method. Then the shuffled array is passed as props to the <Game /> component. The useEffect method is recalled whenever the value of the Boolean gameOver changes.

Game logic

• Two arrays have been created within the <Game /> component state to manage viewing and removing cards. They both had initial values of false:

  • viewCards: Whenever a cards is clicked, the card index representation in this array is changed to true. If there was no match after two cards are clicked, these cards index representation will be switched back to false.
  • removeCards: Whenever two cards match, the cards index representation in this array are change to true and they disappear from the deck. After all the values in this array are changed to true, the Boolean gameOver in the <App /> component is changed to true.

• A Boolean player in <Game /> component is used to identify which player is currently playing. It is set to true for player 1 and false for player 2

• A variable in the state of <Cards /> with the name of firstCard is created that represents the first clicked card. The card is represented by an object with the keys of index and id. index is the index of the card in the shuffled array, and id is the card id. If the no first card has been selected yet, these values are set to null.

• When a second card is clicked. There is a delay of 1500ms before the cards are flipped again if there is no match, or removed from the board if there is a match. During this time, a Boolean pending is set to true to halt any code from execution if another card is clicked.