Need Advice - Multiplayer Card Game

Business and Project Management Discussions
#1

Greetings all,

I created a coming soon multi player card game site over a year ago, and it has yet to see the light of day. ;D You can find it here: http://www.rook-online.com/. It basically plays like spades and I would LOVE to mirror the game functionality found below (but could improve on the looks) of the game below:

http://kurnik.org/intl/en/spades/ - User ID: Rooker - Password: snarf

Unlike most gaming sites, my site idea was to make ONE card game shine, not several or 500 in the case of Yahoo games. I specialize in graphic/web design and web marketing and need some advice from you gurus on the back end of things. From my understanding a developer has to know java and PHP or MySQL to create the client/server environment. I seriously need help with what is needed to create something like this, and can be scalable. For example, have 100 connections max to begin but can go much higher. I would love for someone to explain to me what is needed to create something like this. From what I can tell it needs the following: Control tools, chat server, ranking system, anti-hack/cheat (try at least), database, client/server functionality. What am I missing? How much would a project like this cost realistically? As far as the initial cost and the hosting. Time frame?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. You can contact me at kirebrow@yahoo.com.

Erik Brown
Creator of http://www.rook-online.com/

#2

rooker wuz up.

You ask for many things lol, but i can try to explain.

I am no java programmer, i just got into into it, but i am a C# for 2 years or so… other people will reply to my poor help i give you perhaps in better ways.

basic stuff
2 servers will come in handy. 1 Game server, 1 DataBase .

First of all, The gamer will first login to his user account, his name will be searched in the database. If his name is not found, he will be denied and must register because the game is so awesome lol. If his name is found, he will go to the member page. The member page will have it login to some game search engine. Okay now i will prob get ya lost maybe, maybe not. But Gamer1 and Gamer2 wants to talk (this is in the game while they are playing it, i will explain the gamer part of connection after (sorry if i a sound like yoda or something)…MMMM…Explain I Will) ). Okay since the website is the client program, we don’t have to worry about installation or a program or you may want one. Okay. Gamer1 will send a messaged which will go to the server which will filter it to the person he is talking to which is Gamer2. ( I am not going to go in depth it will be a page long). Now the game stuff works just the same except its a game lol (so much for explaining ). Security, well i know alot of great people that can have that locked down like fort nox but remeber this “when there is a will, there is a way”. As i said, preetie basic coughuseless* stuff what i wrote, someone else will write you up something good because they got more experiance.

If you want more explained, I can explain more if ya want.

how much will this all cost? … I am not even in college or barely out of highschool, so i don’t know the doggie dog world of money.

I say you get some books out and learn because it is really awesome to know and to learn. On some spare time from work or hobbie its all good.
www.titansedge.com and the ADMIN can help you out , with all your needs.

#3

This might be a good time to investigate J2EE. A card game doesn’t require the real time aspects that alot of the other games being written around here do. JBoss (as one example) will provide the application level load balancing and scalability, and it’s free. There are commercial databs products, but there is at least one (although I forgot the name) JDBC driver that connects to multiple JDBC drivers under it to provide redundancy. Depending on how far you want to take it you will also need loadbalancing/redundancy built in to your network switches and get upstream connections from multiple sources.

Initial one instance of JBoss and 1 jdbc server would work and then as funds allow you can scale up and increase the capacity and redundancy of the network.

HTH

Endolf

#4

C-JDBC is what I was thinking of.

Endolf