Everyone said that multiplayer is challenging and my goodness are they right! The added difficulty of playing accross the web has slowed us down but we are making great strides.
Over the past few weeks we have managed to host some playtesting within the team and it has revealed numerous bugs but they are being squished rapidly and we are quickly approaching being ready to let others try out our game!
Here are a few tips when working with multiplayer!
Think timing - Messages won't always appear immediately as they normally do when building a local game so you must be very careful when building in dependencies. Whenever possible make your code fail gracefully and not bring the game down with it.
Minimize Messages - Whenever possible, minimize the number of messages you send accross the server. Your players with weaken internet connections cannot process all the message and will experience lag or disconnection if messages pile up too quickly to process.
Test Test Test - No matter how logically you work through your code, bugs are still going to appear with increased frequency. There are many more factors involved when you have to send messages accross a server and this will cause more breakdowns so iterate quickly!
