@fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk

The platform contract for building games on Dinosaur — a free, open-source, self-hosted platform for tiny multiplayer party games.

A Dinosaur game is small: a state machine on the server, a few React screens on the client, and prefixed wire messages. The platform owns everything universal — rooms and invite codes, reconnect grace, host transfer/kick, snapshot rehydration, leaderboards, reactions, voice, feedback — and this package is the only surface a game touches. The platform can refactor freely behind it.

Entry points

| Import | What you get | | --- | --- | | @fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk | Shared protocol types: PlatformSnapshot, PublicPlayer, LeaderboardEntry, GameResultRow, platform constants | | @fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk/server | BaseGameEngine, GameModule, PlatformEngineDeps, broadcast helpers, Player | | @fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk/client | createGameClient, usePlatformStore, send, feedback + sounds, shared hooks, cross-game UI primitives (PlayerRoster, Leaderboard, JoinQR, …) |

A game in three pieces

Server — extend the engine base and expose a module:

import { BaseGameEngine, type GameModule, type InboundMessage } from "@fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk/server";

class TapRaceEngine extends BaseGameEngine<TapRaceGameState> {
  protected buildGameState(forPlayerId: string): TapRaceGameState { /* … */ }
  protected handleGameMessage(playerId: string, msg: InboundMessage): void { /* … */ }
}

export const tapRaceModule: GameModule = {
  id: "tap-race",
  displayName: "Tap Race",
  describe: () => ["tap-race: ready"],
  createEngine: (deps) => new TapRaceEngine("tap-race", deps.leaderboard),
};

Client — a zustand store with applyGameState + reset, wrapped by the factory that enforces the platform's reconnect contract:

import { createGameClient } from "@fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk/client";

export const tapRaceClient = createGameClient<TapRaceGameState>({
  id: "tap-race",
  displayName: "Tap Race",
  GameView,
  store: useTapRaceStore,
  handleServerMessage,
});

Wire messages — always prefixed (tr:*), sent with send() from @fusiondevstudio/dinosaur-sdk/client; durable state always travels on the snapshot, never in ad-hoc messages, so reconnects rehydrate for free.

The contract that matters

The server's snapshot is the single source of truth. On every welcome and state:sync the platform hands your game its slice via applyGameState; after that call returns, your UI must reflect the snapshot exactly. The createGameClient factory makes this structurally hard to get wrong (it requires onSnapshot/onReset to be symmetric).

Building a full game

Start from the platform repo's building-games guide, or scaffold a complete runnable game with the CLI:

dinosaur new-game tap-race --name "Tap Race"
dinosaur dev --games .

Server-side games are typed against Node and ws; have @types/node in your devDependencies (ws types ship with the SDK).

License

MIT