Hey guys,
tldr:
I'd love to know if any of you would be interested in a noBackend solution for turn based games. For you (as a game dev) that would mean just program 2 files for a game: client.js (all the game design) and server.js (the game logic, so that cheats are prevented) and upload them, and you would have your game online, with all the multiplayer functionality (login, invitation flow, game creation, notifications, chat) for free.
These are not words in the air, most of the pieces are technically coded already.
Longer version:
After having spent an important time looking around, it seems that nowadays, making a multiplayer game cannot go without having to set up a backend and some kind of infra.
More importantly, most games that I have seen that supposedly offer a multiplayer functionality, are actually lacking most of the important features to do so. In particular, it seems almost impossible to play with friends in any of them.
And in a way, it totally makes sense: When you are an indie developer, what you're mostly interested in is designing a great game, not dealing with all the stuff that has to go around it.
And the sad part is that some great games never make it online because of these barriers.
I have been working on a game (adaptation of Risk) for a long time - can be found at http://plynd.com ; already mentionned in an earlier post on this forum.
And as a matter of fact, all the extra stuff (what I call the beyond-the-game experience) really interests me, as I am a backend engineer originally.
And all the work that I've done for Risk has no reason not to serve other people.
Therefore I am turning this game into a platform, and these are the specs:
- All the identity and game management flow is taken care of by the platform (think of : "you've been invited by .. to play" or "it is your turn")
- The backend is provided to store your game state (think plain json)
- The realtime and notification flow is for free
=> This would basically always set you up in a situation where n players have joined your game.
Which means that, as a game developer you can just focus on 2 things:
- implement all the game design within one client.js file. It is run in the browser of the user. nothing new there.
- implement all the game logic that you do not want to run on the client side in server.js. This is where the game state should be updated (to react to players' events). This will run on our servers and you will have a seamless bridge to call these functions from the client.js file.
This is not completely implemented yet, I am working hard to make it happen with a friend of mine. But we have technically proven all the pieces required to make it work. We are now working on making a very basic Connect-4 so people can see how it would really all work together.
Note: the game would be available everywhere (iOS, Android, web) within dedicated apps (but that's HTML5, so you were expecting it right?)
So (finally) comes the questions: would you see that as interesting? Would you use it? What would be your potential concerns? Aside from the technical aspect (that we are pretty confident about) do you think we are completely off somewhere?
Thank you very much for reading this very long post!
Laurent