Some shameless self promotion here.. if you haven't click away in disgust already, thanks! hopefully I'll make this read worth your while and if you're a midnight game developer or interested in budget games in general, would be great to know if you find this post interesting.
The Pan
Create a multi-player browser game that can be played across multiple devices using free opensource tools and libraries and share findings.
TLDR
For those who want to see the final game, here it is running on Azure.
Source code available in Github:
teamhitori
/
running-man
Game Demo using Frakas
Running Man multiplayer demo game using Frakas
Run locally
Prerequisites
- Install [Node.js] which includes [Node Package Manager][npm]
- Install Typescript
Usage
To build and run:
frakas serve
This with compile typescript files, start a backend run time and basic web server to host game.
For questions or how to contribute, reach me at reubenh@frakas.net
Back to the plan
For the rendering engine I am using Babylonjs. It's a free and opensource, JavaScript rendering engine that runs in the browser on top of WebGL, it's really easy to use, has great documentation and a vibrant user community.
to get started you can can try out the engine without any tools, and directly from your browser using the playground:
Babylon Playground
The challenge is that I also want some game logic to run centrally that can deal with events from all connected players such as new players entering / exiting the game and passing around general game events.
For this I'll use a nodejs framework called Frakas. This is a nodejs framework that I have been working on, that helps with wiring up backend logic to connected players, and simplifies this interaction, along with local development.
teamhitori
/
frakas
Frakas the multiplayer framework
@frakas/cli is a command line tool a nodejs library and a cloud backend for making games multiplayer.
What can I do?
Get started making a browser based multiplayer in one command. The frakas api is opinionated and simplifies common challenges in making an online distributed multiplayer game.
Getting Started
Prerequisites
- Install [Node.js] which includes [Node Package Manager][npm]
- Install Typescript
Installation
To use FRAKAS in your project, run:
npm i @frakas/cli
Usage
To get setup run:
frakas init
This will create files required for basic application in you current directory
To build and run:
frakas serve
This with compile typescript files, start a backend run time and basic web server to host game.
Below is an example of the Hello World game that is created.
For questions or how to contribute, reach me at reubenh@frakas.net
Finally I need a cheap way to host my game, Microsoft Azure have a great Service called Webapps, with a cool free tier which provides us with 1 hour per day up-time for development.
The Game
To keep things really simple, the basic idea will be for a group of up to 6 players to enter some kind of Area, each player will have a color assigned and the goal will be to collect the ball that matches your color and get back to base. The first one back wins, the last one looses. To add some variability, you can pick up other balls and throw at other players, if hit by a ball, you will drop your ball and "go flying".
Setting things up
Details of setting up Frakas are available on the github page, but in short you'll need to have nodejs installed.
Run the following command
npm i -g @frakas/cli
The following Frakas command will install Babylonjs and setup a basic game.
frakas init
Run the following command to compile and serve your game locally.
frakas serve
Open up your browser at http://localhost:8080 and you should see the following:
Running game in Azure
In order to push the game to Azure, I'll use the azure CLI, a great way to automate changes to Azure service.
Assuming that you are able to run your game locally, pushing to Azure can be done in the following commands:
Log in to Azure
az login
Push changes
az webapp up --sku F1 --name $appname -g $appname
To conclude
I've left out many details about how I put the game together, challenges and design decisions, but I'd be happy to create a 2nd post if any interest!
I think that there's huge potential in making multiplayer game creation more accessible to developers.
cheers.
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