Multiplayer game advice
Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2014 4:44 pmI require the advice of some people who make games, specifically who know more than me about online multiplayer.
A couple years ago I experimented with making a game based on an idea for a “board” game that my brothers developed over the past few years. The game could be described as similar in general concept to scrabble, but at the same time, nothing like scrabble. I began working in GE with no formal programming experience, hoping to make nothing more than a simple demo to show off the concept of the game. I had a lot of frustration but also great success with GE and it got me really interested in C# programming. After much hard work and trial and error, I finally have a playable demo that works fairly well. Here is my problem.
This game requires a minimum of 3 people to play. Since GE has no network support yet, I feel I can't take the project much further. I was patiently waiting for news of an update to GE that might bring network support but it really doesn't look like that will be happening anytime soon. As a work around for online play testing (currently only between about 5 people), I created a few scripts using mIRC, an ancient (but still current and awesome) IRC client that I used to fool around with scripting for when I was a teen. The scripts enable multiplayer by sharing data between clients over an IRC chatroom and writing data to text files used by my game. For testing purposes, it works almost perfectly as the game only needs to share data between clients at the beginning and end of each round. It's hard to explain exactly how it works without going into detail about the game, but the main thing is that it works. It's obviously not a permanent solution if the game were ever released as a retail product.
So given that I can't currently create or even begin to work on a multiplayer in GE and I'm not very good at holding my breath, do I;
A: Start from scratch on another game development engine that supports online play and if so what is closest to GE code wise? Can I convert my existing code or do I have to re-write everything?
B: Develop some kind of simple program that basically does the same thing mIRC is doing now and runs along side my finished game. I'm basically just reading and writing very simple data to shared text files between mIRC and the GE game. Would a CGI script that runs on a web server be able to do something like this?
C: Try to somehow add the bare basic network features I need to GE source although I don't even have a clue how to start on this option and if no one has done it yet, I certainly don't have the core programming skills needed to do this.
D: Another option I haven't thought of?
My plan is to test the game further with maybe about 100 people, improve the game, test some more and then see if it is worth taking the next step which would likely be hiring a real programmer to code a marketable product, probably from scratch. I could test it right now but I can't expect all the testers to download mIRC especially considering it's not free. So what is my best option to get the game to a “beta test” phase? Thanks for any advice you have!
A couple years ago I experimented with making a game based on an idea for a “board” game that my brothers developed over the past few years. The game could be described as similar in general concept to scrabble, but at the same time, nothing like scrabble. I began working in GE with no formal programming experience, hoping to make nothing more than a simple demo to show off the concept of the game. I had a lot of frustration but also great success with GE and it got me really interested in C# programming. After much hard work and trial and error, I finally have a playable demo that works fairly well. Here is my problem.
This game requires a minimum of 3 people to play. Since GE has no network support yet, I feel I can't take the project much further. I was patiently waiting for news of an update to GE that might bring network support but it really doesn't look like that will be happening anytime soon. As a work around for online play testing (currently only between about 5 people), I created a few scripts using mIRC, an ancient (but still current and awesome) IRC client that I used to fool around with scripting for when I was a teen. The scripts enable multiplayer by sharing data between clients over an IRC chatroom and writing data to text files used by my game. For testing purposes, it works almost perfectly as the game only needs to share data between clients at the beginning and end of each round. It's hard to explain exactly how it works without going into detail about the game, but the main thing is that it works. It's obviously not a permanent solution if the game were ever released as a retail product.
So given that I can't currently create or even begin to work on a multiplayer in GE and I'm not very good at holding my breath, do I;
A: Start from scratch on another game development engine that supports online play and if so what is closest to GE code wise? Can I convert my existing code or do I have to re-write everything?
B: Develop some kind of simple program that basically does the same thing mIRC is doing now and runs along side my finished game. I'm basically just reading and writing very simple data to shared text files between mIRC and the GE game. Would a CGI script that runs on a web server be able to do something like this?
C: Try to somehow add the bare basic network features I need to GE source although I don't even have a clue how to start on this option and if no one has done it yet, I certainly don't have the core programming skills needed to do this.
D: Another option I haven't thought of?
My plan is to test the game further with maybe about 100 people, improve the game, test some more and then see if it is worth taking the next step which would likely be hiring a real programmer to code a marketable product, probably from scratch. I could test it right now but I can't expect all the testers to download mIRC especially considering it's not free. So what is my best option to get the game to a “beta test” phase? Thanks for any advice you have!