KaXing

We have Kahoot at home

A real-time quiz game where questions are displayed on a screen and players answer on their phones.

Works just like that other quiz game, except free and open source and not owned by private equity.

Includes many core features, such as:

• Multiple choice questions
• True / false questions
• Short answer questions
• Image support
• Static, non-question slides

Also includes a bunch of features I wanted, including:

• Remotely control the game from your phone
• A map / geo-guesser style question type
• Custom regex matching on short answer questions
• Advanced timing controls, pausing on the question intro for as long as needed
• Option to show answer choices without accepting responses
• Ability to jump around questions
• Custom game joining questions (eg: student ID)
• Dual screen mode with image-only display on second screen
• Customizable music

Play

Create your own or play a game at https://michaelxing.com/kaxing

My site hosts no user content. All games are saved as a proprietary .kaxing file (totally not a renamed JSON) to your local machine.

Custom Music

To specify custom music at runtime, your music files must be hosted on a publicly accessible web server. You must also host a JSON file with the following format:

{
  "theme": "<theme song>",
  "end": "<time's up sound effect>",
  "gg": "<podium song>",
  "q": {
    "10": [
      "<list of>",
      "<10 sec>",
      "<countdown>",
      "<songs>"
    ],
    "20": [
      "<etc>"
    ],
    "30": [
      "<etc>"
    ],
    "60": [
      "<etc>"
    ],
    "90": [
      "<etc>"
    ]
  }
}

Here, each value is the URL of the associated music or sound effect. This JSON must be hosted at a location whose CORS headers allow reading from michaelxing.com. Then, on the game board page, pass the URL of the JSON as a query parameter to load the music.

Develop

The main game itself is written in TypeScript with no UI libraries or frameworks. From the root directory, run npm ci to install dependencies and then npm start to start a dev server. The client will run on localhost:3000. Note that the dev server does not hot-reload for server-side changes.

Run npm run server-build and npm run client-build to build the output bundles for the server and client, respectively.

The question editor is a separate project, inside the client/editor directory. This is a React app running on Vite, requiring a separate npm ci from inside the folder to install dependencies. Then, npm run dev to start the dev server. npm run build builds the final editor.