GuessWhoTV is an online, TV-themed version of the classic board game “Guess Who?”, where players each guess the identity of the other's chosen character.
When my girlfriend and I would go on longer train journeys, we would decide to play Guess Who but with the cast of a TV show we both knew. We would look on Google Images for an image that had the entire cast on it — this was sometimes difficult or impossible to find. We would then send the picture in our chat and use the photo editors on our phones to cross people out of the game. I figured this could be a fun project that would let me and my friends, or any pair of people play a fun game more easily.
GuessWhoTV uses a TV show database called TVMaze as its data source, a community-maintained collection of metadata on over 60k shows.
If a show has at least 6 characters listed in the database as part of its main cast, only the main cast will be displayed as starter characters. If not, the game will try to gather guest characters from the show to include. Players can also create their own customized set of characters to play with and easily share it with their friends.
As opposed to the original Guess Who, where characters purposefully have easily noticeable physical differences, this might not always work with the cast of a TV show. Instead, you can make use of the fact that both players (hopefully) are familiar with the characters in the show, and ask questions about their personality, behaviour, vibes. Playing with TV shows instead of a static set of characters also makes for more diversity.
This game is made using Remix, a full-stack React framework. Because of this, it can run without JavaScript! The code does make use of JavaScript when available, but the game is fully functional without it as well. No one really browses without JS enabled anymore, but it was still fun to make it work this way, and I wanted to try since Remix allowed me to do this more easily than using plain React would.