📡 Frequency

A peer-to-peer party game in the spirit of Wavelength. One player (the Psychic) sees a hidden target on a spectrum between two odd extremes — "Hot ↔ Cold", "Culturally significant ↔ insignificant" — gives a short clue, and the team drags a live shared dial to guess it. Closer = more points. Psychic rotates every round. Big celebratory finale. Then back to the lobby.

No server. No database. No accounts. No setup. Just open the page and play.

🎮 Play: https://vviseguy.github.io/frequency/

How to play

1. One person taps Host a new game → gets a 4-letter room code + QR + share link.
2. Everyone else opens the link (or enters the code) on their phone.
3. The host taps Start — no settings to fiddle with.
4. Everyone writes a clue at the same time for their own hidden target on a weird spectrum.
5. The game then cycles through each player's clue: everyone else drags the shared dial and taps Lock it in; the target is revealed and the clue-giver scores by how close the group got.
6. Game length auto-scales with the room — smaller groups give more clues each (3 per person ≤4 players, 2 per person ≤8, 1 in big groups). No options to set.
7. A scoreboard breather between sets, then an animated recap builds to the champion and everyone bounces back to the lobby.

• Hosting auto-falls-back: if the host closes their tab/loses signal, the most senior player (earliest to join) seamlessly becomes the new host and the game continues. Keep the host on a device that won't sleep for the smoothest ride.
• Reactions (😂🎉🔥) pop a sound and rain that emoji across everyone's screen — a small budget per turn so it never gets noisy.
• Top-left menu (the ☰): light/dark mode, sound on/off, how-to-play, and leave-game. The drifting background calms to a freeze during focused play.

Editing the prompts

Prompts are organised into versioned topic packs under public/prompts/ — currently 22 packs, ~880 spectrum pairs. The host can pick which topics are in play from the lobby (🎲 Topics).

• prompts/index.json — lists which pack ids are active.
• prompts/<id>.json — one topic pack: { name, emoji, version, prompts }.

To add prompts: open a pack file on GitHub, append a line, bump its version, commit to main. No IDs to manage — they're derived automatically.

{ "left": "One extreme", "right": "The other extreme" }

To add a whole topic: drop a new prompts/<id>.json (same shape, with a name and an emoji) and add its id to prompts/index.json. It shows up as a card in the topic picker automatically. The site auto-redeploys in ~1 minute.

Local development

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173/frequency/  (also exposed on your LAN for phone testing)
npm run build    # typecheck + production build into dist/
npm run preview  # serve the production build locally

To test multiplayer locally, open the dev URL in several browser tabs/devices — create a room in one, join with the code in the others.

Tests

npm test          # Vitest unit suite (scoring, reducer/state machine, rounds, room codes, migration)
npm run test:e2e  # Playwright: real multi-peer WebRTC e2e against a local PeerJS broker

The e2e suite spins up its own local PeerJS server (no public broker, fully deterministic) and drives three isolated browser contexts through: a complete 2-round game (host → join → clue → guess → reveal → recap → lobby) and a host-migration scenario (kill the host mid-lobby; assert the most-senior player takes over and can keep running the game). CI runs both via .github/workflows/ci.yml, separate from the Pages deploy so a flaky network never blocks shipping.

Networking notes (optional)

P2P uses PeerJS's free public broker for signaling only; gameplay traffic is direct WebRTC between devices. Two situational env vars (create a .env file) help on hostile networks:

Var	Purpose
VITE_TURN_URL / VITE_TURN_USER / VITE_TURN_CRED	A TURN relay for strict/cellular NATs where direct WebRTC fails.
VITE_PEER_HOST / VITE_PEER_PORT / VITE_PEER_PATH	Point signaling at your own self-hosted PeerServer instead of the public broker.

Neither is needed for normal play (same Wi-Fi / typical home networks).

Deployment

Push to main → GitHub Actions builds and publishes to GitHub Pages (.github/workflows/deploy.yml). Vite base is /frequency/; routing keys off the ?room= query so deep links survive a hard refresh.

Built with React + TypeScript + Vite + Tailwind + Framer Motion + PeerJS.