Multiplayer Game Development with HTML5

Build fully-featured, highly interactive multiplayer games with HTML5

About This Book

• Design, develop, manage, debug, and release your multiplayer web-based HTML5 games
• Allow players to go head to head against each other, or collaborate together in the same game world
• A progressive, hands-on guide that builds on an existing single-player game, and adds more networking capabilities at each of the iterations

Who This Book Is For

If you are a HTML5 game developer who can make basic single-player games and you are now ready to incorporate multiplayer functionality in your games as quickly as possible, then this book is ideal for you.

What You Will Learn

• Design games using various multiplayer models
• Create authoritative game servers
• Develop game clients that communicate and synchronize with other clients through WebSockets
• Write responsive multiplayer games using client prediction
• Upgrade an existing single-player game by adding multiplayer mechanics
• Use state-of-the-art technologies to make the development process and its end product enjoyable to programmers and amazing to the player
• Create peer-to-peer gaming using WebRTC

In Detail

Developing an online game can be just as much fun as playing it. However, orchestrating multiple clients and keeping everyone in sync with a game server, reducing and managing network latency (all the while preventing cheating), and making sure every player has an excellent experience can quickly become overwhelming.

This book will teach you how to develop games that support multiple players interacting in the same game world, and show you how to perform network programming operations in order to implement such systems. It covers the fundamentals of game networking by developing a real-time multiplayer game of Tic-tac-toe before moving on to convert an existing 2D single-player snake game to multiplayer, using a more scalable game design for online gaming.

Finally you will be tackling more advanced networking topics, allowing you to handle problems such as server queries from multiple users and making your multiplayer games more secure and less prone to cheating.