I’ve created a simple game where 2 players make a simultaneous choice in each round, and the winner of the round is determined by a set of rules specific to the game. Sort of like how Rock Paper Scissors works.
I’d like to be able to offer this game online where 2 players can find and play against each other. There would be some central server to arbitrate the game, and then each player would interact with the game using some game client of his choice that we would provide (i.e. web-based, mobile-based, Flash, etc).
Obviously, a player could also play against a computer opponent that we could provide. I’d also like to have the capability to allow programmers to submit computer programs that they’ve written to act as players and play against other programs in some sort of tournament.
I realize that the specifics of my game would certainly need to be written from scratch, but it seems that all of the work that the servers would have to do to communicate with the clients and maintain the state of the game has probably been done many times before. This is probably the bulk of the work.
Does anyone have any ideas for how this could be done quickly and easily? Are there servers available with some sort of standard interface to drop new games into? Is there some sort of open source game server? How would you go about doing this?
Seeing as the clients only communicate with the game server occasionally (as opposed to continuously), a web framework should be able to serve as your “basic game server”. While web frameworks may be made for providing “web pages”, they can certainly be (ab)used to serve as request handlers.
This certainly doesn’t force you to make the game a browser game; standalone game clients can be made easily, and they can communicate with your game server using basic http. I also heard this thing called Ajax is pretty nifty for such things.
Not only will you find a lot of ready-made http-based servers, as an added bonus, there is a lot more documentation on how to work with Web 2.0®©™ than “game servers”. You just need to know that you want a web framework that lets you easily manage sessions and receive/respond to requests and a client library that does likewise.
As an added aside, “maintaining the state of the game”, as you put it, falls 100% within the domain of the actual game logic. But many web frameworks come with good database support, and will surely be useful for this kind of thing.