Question

I am trying to build a simple turn-based facebook game on javascript. So in my game when a player (i.e Alex) presses a submit button and ends his turn, it is another player’s (i.e Jack) turn. My problem is the following: At first the game runs on Alex’s pc. Then, after an event trigger on Alex’s pc, the game must go on (or make a new instance of it) on Jack’s pc.Is it part of a request dialog (player to player)? How can I implement this?

Answer 1

If you want to do something like SongPop, where it doesn’t matter when exactly second player will take his turn, you can simply do this in those few steps:

1. Alex starts a game taking his turn.
2. When his turn is over, your app tells Alex to tell Jack that it’s his turn now, using requests dialogs.
3. Jack logs to Facebook and see notification with request from Alex.
4. When Jack clicks on this notification, he is taken to the app.
5. Each time user enter homepage of your app your app checks if there are any requests to be processed and removed.
6. App allows Jack to take his turn in the game that Alex started.

If you want users to take more turns, like for example in chess game, steps 2-6 will be repeated. And, of course, think about informing player that didn’t take the last turn when the game is over.

If you want to do something like Rummikub, where each player have to be online in the same time, your logic would be more complicated and you will not use app requests to notify user that he should take his turn. In this case you would need realtime checking of actions taken by players and informing other players about those actions.