Make multiplayer games

From simple platformer games to complex multiplayers, you can build a strong foundation for multiple hobbies and careers. And with these skills, you'll be ready to work with many exciting platforms, including Python, Java, Android, GitHub, and more!

Basically, going from single-player to multiplayer game design will help you grow so much. If you haven't done so already, you can start a Scratch account today. All you need is a compatible device, brower, and web connection to begin your journey. Creating a multiplayer Scratch game does require previous experience.

If you're new, don't worry! Read our introduction to Scratch and get familiar with it. Once you've learned the basics, you'll be ready to build your own game and enjoy gameplay with others! My First Scratch Project beginners. How to Make a Scratch Game step by step.

How to Make a Platformer on Scratch beginners. You can also find inspiration from the most famous Scratcher on the platform, griffpatch. Check out some of his most popular multiplayer cloud games. At this point, you should be comfortable with Scratch blocks, sprites, and other game objects. If you need help, you can take a look at these handy tutorials:.

How to Make a 3D Game in Scratch intermediate. How to Make a Sprite Move Smoothly intermediate. Scratch allows you to make two types of multiplayer video games: local multiplayer and online multiplayer. Below, you'll find sections on each kind of project.

Local multiplayer lets you play with more than one person on the same computer. Online multiplayer lets you connect with multiple devices and multiple players, whether they are in the same building or a different country. In this example, we'll assume two players are going to use the same keyboard to control the game. There will be two characters or sprites , one for player 1 and another for player 2. Since you'll be sharing the same keyboard, each player is assigned different controls.

Player 1, for this example, will be on the left side using the letter keys. Player 2 will be on the right side, using the arrow keys to move their character. Scratch makes it easy to connect with other players from all over the world through cloud variables. You can read more about the function and more on Scratch Wiki.

Keep in mind that new Scratchers cannot use this functionality because of restrictions. You must get full Scratcher status in order to use cloud data. This coding is more extensive. Don't fret! Take your time. Before you know it, you'll be playing with others from other countries in your own game! Before we start block coding for a basic multiplayer, there are several variables that must be created. If you're like me, you probably have your mouse whizzing across the board by now.

Take some time to enjoy your results. OK, now you have a grid that lights up when the player's mouse moves over a line. But this isn't a game where you just have to move your mouse around a bunch. You need to add the click-to-lay-down-line functionality. To do this, you're going to use PyGame's built-in mouse function, which is simply pygame.

The function returns either 1 or 0, depending on whether the mouse button is currently pressed down. Before I tell you how to implement this in your game, try figuring it out yourself. Remember how you used if statements before and how to create a piece on the board. If you click, you place a line just where you were hovering.

As you can see, the code you added checks if the mouse is pressed and if the line should be horizontal or vertical, and places the line accordingly.

One problem, though, is that if you click at the bottom of the screen below where the boxes are drawn , the game crashes. Let's see why this is. When something crashes, usually it gives you an error report in the Terminal. In this case, the report looks like this:. This error is saying that the array boardh that you tried to access doesn't go as far as where you clicked.

Remember that variable called isoutofbounds? That will come in handy here. Simply change this:. Now if you try clicking outside of the board, the game doesn't crash. Good job — you have just demonstrated the word debugging! Before you begin implementing the game logic on the server side, let's first add some finishing touches to the client side.

One thing that really bugs me are the spaces at the junctions of the lines. Fortunately, you can fix this quite easily using a 7x7 grid of square dots to fill in those spaces. Of course, you do need the image file, so let's load that right now and at the same time add all of the other images you will be using in this section. Now that you image is loaded, let's draw each of the 49 dots onto the screen.

Add this to the end of drawBoard :. All right, enough code! It's time for a test run. Run the game, and you should get a better-looking grid. Next, let's put a head-up display or HUD at the bottom of the screen. First, you need to create the drawHUD method.

Add this code after drawBoard :. Now that you know that, you can use this information to draw the next part of the HUD: the "Your Turn" indicator.

Add this code at the bottom of drawHUD :. This code creates the font, renders it in white and then draws it onto the screen. Before you try running the game, add this after the call to self.

Run the program and you should get some text that says "Your Turn" at the bottom of the screen. If you look closely, you can also see the nicely textured background. This is great, but you still need to add the indicator after the "Your Turn" text to let the player know it's their round. Before you do, though, you want the game to know whose turn it is. Run the game and you will see the green score indicator. You can check that off of your list of things to do.

Next let's add the text for each player's score. Remember how to add text? You're going to do the same type of thing you did before, but with differently sized fonts. Add this to the end of drawHUD :. You are now officially done with the HUD. There are just a couple more things to do on the client side, so bear with me. Next, let's add a very simple owner grid that contains values representing a player.

These values will let you keep track of who owns which squares. You need this to color the squares properly, and to keep track of the score. Remember, the person who controls the most squares wins! Now draw the owner grid onto the screen using the same kind of 2d-array loop that you used to loop through the lines arrays. Both are great in their own right and have a lot in common, but there are a few factors you can consider before determining which is best for your project.

On the other hand, Unity was created for smaller games and particularly mobile apps. It offers multiple networking tools Photon is especially praised but their main solution UNET has been discontinued , with no fully-fledged options to replace it. Thus, until Unity implements a new solution, developers face an extra level of difficulty in setting up networking for AAA titles.

Once you set your mind on using UE for your project and establish the tech stack, you will have to make countless decisions that will impact the process. To put it simply, Blueprints allow you to prototype, create logic, feedback, and UI much quicker than you could with coding. At the same time, this system is much more limited in what you can achieve and tends to run slower.

The more complicated the functionality, the harder it will be to achieve it in Blueprints. You will have a hard time using Blueprints to build an online game past the prototype phase. For games with non-playable characters or AI opponents replacing standard competitors, it can be very difficult to create a balanced UE4 multiplayer AI. Replication refers to the synchronization of data between clients and servers i.

You will need to configure it for Actors, Components, and Properties, and make the whole system scalable to account for varying numbers of simultaneous players.

This work includes optimizing anything that causes lag, frame rate loss, and loss of packets. For example, an animation that activates when a player interacts with an object will need dozens of new behaviors added, based on factors like proximity of other players, the chronology of who interacted with the item first, and how long the item remains in this new state. In other words, the number of scenarios and animations to plan multiplies exponentially. This is more of a business challenge than a technical one.

It takes an immense amount of resources and costs to keep MP lobbies running, so you need a constant stream of players and proper monetization to make the whole project worthwhile. As is the case with other types of software development projects, most of your costs will go toward paying the salaries of developers, designers, QA engineers, and everyone else involved with the project.

With that said, one big factor that will influence the cost is speed — how quickly the project will be carried out. You can also expect the Unreal Engine multiplayer networking cost to include expenditures like maintaining a dedicated server or multiple servers , licensing software for the models, artwork, and UE4 itself, and investing in hardware that the software will be tested on.