Disclaimer: your definition of brilliant may vary
Where to start
The hardest part of coding up multiplayer games is the setup, it's just a sh*t tonne of boilerplate:
Setting up the server
- Creating the player object
- Setting up the socket
- The tick rate
- Players joining the game
- Players leaving the game
Setting up the client
- Creating the canvas
- Connecting to server
- Rendering the entire game
WAIT!!! 🛑
Don't give up on this blog already. I've been a proper good lad and compiled a quick starter project for you so you can just completely ignore all of the stuff above.
What is P5 Multiplayer Game Starter?
It’s a very simple way to kick-start your multiplayer game development using express, socket.io and p5.js. It represents an opinionated approach to multiplayer game development which should allow you to skip the laborious beginning boiler-plate steps.
How to use this magical repository?
git clone https://github.com/LukeGarrigan/p5-multiplayer-game-start.git-
npm installin the root directory -
npm startto get it running!
Details
The project is very simple, it sets up a client Player class and a server Player. Every 16ms the server emits the current state of the game to the client. If a new client joins the server a new Player will be added to the game and displayed on all clients, it also automatically removes players when they leave the game. These are the standard features I frequently have to reproduce when creating a new multiplayer game, so I hope you find this as useful as I do!
Each client will be a player of your game, they all communicate with the server. The server will control all the game state, such as the player position. The position of the player will be emitted to the all of the clients so that each client can render (using p5) the player in the game!
A demo of your game so far!
A player joins the game by going to localhost:8080
Your friend then joins!
Your friend sees how bloody good you are at the game and quickly leaves..
So basically, in its simplest form the repository handles clients joining and leaving the game.
So there we go, what I recommend you do is having a play around with the repository, add some basic physics, get some interaction with the clients. This should give you the very basic building blocks of your next IO hit!
Finally
I hope this helps some of you and I would love to see the games you create with the starter project! Please share them in the comments 😁
Follow me on twitter if you don't want to miss out on absolutely brilliant programming insight: 🤣 @luke_garrigan
Thank you, if you like my rambling check out my personal blogging site at https://codeheir.com/
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Oldest comments (5)
😂😂
Great post Luke! Building a multiplayer game with express and socket.io on the server-side is in my bucketlist, I'll definitely check out your repo.
Haha I’m glad you liked it. It’s just a really really fun thing to do, I can spend hours just hacking away at it and loving every minute!
Awesome! I'll give it a try at my Uni with some more CS nerds :P thanks Luke!
Awesome, I’d love to see what you come up with!
Good post, just to let you know though repo address is wrong, went into your github and it should be
post is missing a couple letters