Looking for introductory information

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

I’m new to game development, but not new to java. I’m a profesional developer and my employer is looking to create an online multiplayer game. The game will be a boardgame or trivia type game likely with a Flash client. It will feature leaderboards and head-to-head play … think Yahoo! games, or online poker.

I’ve been looking for appropriate research/reading material for this type of game. Everything I’ve found so far relating to online gaming refers to MMO or FPS … which is not to the scope I’m interested in.

Can you point me to good materials to get my feet wet? Books, online articles or sites, other message boards, whatever you think would be helpful. Thanks.

#2

Well I dont knwo of any articles on baord games or card games per se, but we can certainly help you and point you towards specific answers to specific problems.

In general youve chosen a good category because its a lot easier then those we usually discuss here and as such is excellent as a strate project. Having said that, you don’t really need to use most “game programming” tehcniques to implement a game suchas this. You could probably do the whole thign in Swing if you really wanted to.

I notice you mentioend Flash as a client. Where does Java come in? Are you looking to try toi convince your boss to use Java instead of Flash? Are you just thinking about Java on the server side?

Tell us more about the project and we can probably be of more help.

#3

Yes, I’m thinking of Java as the game server/connection manager. I guess what I’m looking for is very much network related. Flash is pretty much decided on as the client, as we have excellent Flash talent here, and practically no applet nor Swing talent (I’m a J2EE developer primarily). It’s looking like the game will be a trivia game. 5 players at a time in a game, first one to answer correctly gets the points, that type of thing.

So, I’m looking to possibly build our own game server. My original post was to ferrett out any newbie/introductory material that I should look at to get started. Perhaps there’s nothing special about game networking that I need to know, and it’s just straight networking but with game rules, etc.? I’m also looking at the following products as alternatives, does anyone have any experience with/opinions of them?

J2Play
http://www.j2play.net/
http://www.j2x.ca/developer/

SecurePlay
http://www.secureplay.com

Thanks.

#4

You can easily do this kind of game server in J2EE if you already knwo it and are comfortable with it.

That has the added advantage that it will work with any clietn and firewall that can talk to a web server :slight_smile: