Question

I’d like to start developing a "simple" game with HTML5 and I’m quite confused by the many resources I found online. I have a solid background in development, but in completely different environments (ironically, I started programming because I wanted to become a game developer, and it’s the only thing I’ve never done in 13 years…).

The confusion derives from the fact that, although I know JavaScript very well and I have some knowledge of HTML5, I can’t figure out how to mix what I know with all this new stuff. For example, here’s what I was thinking of:

1. The game would be an implementation of chess. I have some simple "ready made" AI algorithm that I can reuse for single player; the purpose here is to learn HTML5 game development, so this part is not very important at the moment.

2. I’d like build a website around the game. For this I’d use a "regular" CMS, as I know many of them already and it would be faster to put it up.

3. Then I’d have the game itself, which, in its "offline" version, has nothing to do with the website, as, as far as I understand, it would live in a page by itself. This is the first question: how to make the Game aware of User’s session? The login would be handled by the CMS (it should be much easier this way, as User Managememt is already implemented).

4. As a further step, I’d like to move the AI to the server. This is the second question: how do I make the game send player’s actions to the Server, and how do I get the answer back?

5. Later on, I’d like to bring a PVP element to the game, i.e. one-against-one multiplayer (like the good old chess). This is the third question: how to send information from a client to another, and keep the conversation going on. For this, people recommended me to have a look at Node.js, but it’s one more element that I can’t figure out how to "glue" to the rest.

   Here’s an example of a single action in a PVP session, which already gives me a headache: Player 1 sends his move to the Server (how does the game talk to Node.js?). I’d need to identify the Game Id (where and how should I store it?), and make sure the player hasn’t manually modified it, so it won’t interfere with someone else’s game (how?).

I’m aware that the whole thing, as I wrote it, is very messy, but that’s precisely how I feel at the moment. I can’t figure out where to start, therefore any suggestion is extremely welcome.

Answer 1

Too many things and probably in the wrong order.

A lot of the issues don’t seem to me to be particularly related to HTML5 in the first instance.

Start with the obvious thing – you want a single page (basically a javascript application) that plays chess, so build that. If you can’t build that then the rest is substantially irrelevant, if you can build (and I don’t doubt that you can) then the rest is about building on that capability.

So we get to your first question – well at the point at which you load the page you will have the session, its a web page, like any other web page, so that’s how you get the session. If you’re offline then you’ve persisted that from when you were online by whatever means – presumably local storage.

You want to move the AI to the server? Ok, so make sure that the front end user interaction talks to an “interface” to record the player moves and retrieve the AI moves. Given this separation you can replaces the AI on the client with an ajax (although I’d expect the x to be json!) call to the server with the same parameters.

This gets better, if you want to do player to player you’re just talking about routing through the server from one user/player to another user/player – the front end code doesn’t have to change, just what the server does at the far end of the ajax call.

But for all this, take a step back and solve the problems one at a time – if you do that you should arrive where you want to go without driving yourself nuts trying to worry about a bucket full of problems that seem scary that you can probably easily solve one at a time and I’d start by getting your game to run, all on its own, in the browser.