These are really popular, (usually) single input, multiplayer games. e.g. agar.io, slither.io, etc.
Well, so long as you can create a system where players can move around a screen and see other players then you are good.
I use web tech for games, so that's what I'm sticking to.
Yes.
I'll split it up into different parts, but at the end of this series you should be able to test your game on your PC and we can even deploy it to heroku for testing.
But this all depends on the traffic to the videos and if I see that people watching are actually trying to implement (Link to Video Here).
Now, our stack we'll be simple, we'll use common tech used to make games quickly, so that it's easier for you to find info if you get stuck.
- First up is PhaserJS. I've used this quite a bit before, so I'll stick with it for this game as well (I'll be using version 3 btw)
- Next will be Express JS, we'll use this to serve our code on our nodeJS server (I think I just lost some viewers, but hey, life)
- We'll pair that with socket.io so that we have realtime communication with the server, also socket.io has what the creators call rooms, something that will be extremely useful for us when the game has too many players.
For now at least, those will be the three pillars that we'll build the game on top of. And no, we won't be using webpack/snowpack and the like. No transpilers :'( either, I know, I want to use TypeScript as well, but what this to be as accessible as is possible. Also the concept will be simple, so no audio, that's for your to figure out (hint: HowlerJS).
We'll be needing 2 folders: a /public folder (for the website that clients see) and a /server (for all things to do with the server).
Inside of the /public folder we'll need 3 files: an index.html, main.js, and styles.css file.
As for the /server folder we'll be adding a simple server.js file that will hold our server code that we'll borrow from the express.js site.
Now we'll be using npm and node in this project (obviously). So a quick npm init -y to setup the project is in order, no?
Follow that up with a npm i express so that we can use express for serving our files.
After that dependency has installed, we'll have to now write our server.js code to server content in our index.html file. But before we do that, let's add a simple Hello World message in our index.html file. This way we can see something when the page loads.
Check the server/server.js code to see how exactly the code should look like.
You are now ready to test this code. Open your terminal and run node server/server.js. This should show a message telling you what port your site is being served on.
Open localhost:3000 in your browser and you should see Hello World printed onto the screen.
TODO: Step 2 We'll setup the game, with the player on screen and able to move around as well.