Categories.LIVE

Live at categories.zachbroad.com.

Real-time multiplayer word game built with React, Socket.IO, and GPT-4.

Players join rooms, receive a category, and race to submit answers. Responses are scored in real time using OpenAI, and results are displayed live to all participants.

Features

• Real-time multiplayer gameplay with Socket.IO rooms and live chat
• AI-powered answer scoring via OpenAI (GPT-4)
• Game state machine managing lobby, active rounds, scoring, and results
• Responsive React client with Zustand state management
• Horizontally scalable server with PostgreSQL-backed adapters and Terraform infrastructure

Tech Stack

Client: React 18, React Router v7 (SSR), Tailwind CSS v4, Zustand, Socket.IO Client, Vite

Server: Node.js, Fastify, Socket.IO, OpenAI SDK, PostgreSQL, Awilix (DI), Zod

Infrastructure: Turborepo, pnpm workspaces, Docker, Terraform (AWS), Netlify

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Node.js >= 20.10
• pnpm 9.x

Install

pnpm install

Development

# Start all apps (web client + game server)
pnpm dev

# Or run individually
pnpm --filter=@categories/web dev
pnpm --filter=@categories/server dev

The server requires environment variables for PostgreSQL and OpenAI. Copy .env.example (if available) or configure:

• DATABASE_URL -- PostgreSQL connection string
• OPENAI_API_KEY -- OpenAI API key for answer scoring

Build

pnpm build

Project Structure

apps/
  web/       React Router v7 client (Netlify deployment)
  server/    Socket.IO game server (Docker deployment)
packages/
  ui/        Shared component library (Shadcn UI)
  *-config/  Shared ESLint, TypeScript, Prettier, Tailwind, Vite configs
infra/       Terraform configuration for AWS

License

MIT