Rook-Online wants YOU! - Multiplayer Card Game

Business and Project Management Discussions Community & Volunteer Projects
#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. If someone is also interested in helping me out with the project that would be awesome! I can do all of the front end work. I would love one day to test and play my OWN game on MY site. :-* You can contact me at kirebrow@yahoo.com.

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

#2

If cheat-resistance is a must, I suggest that all the game functionality is on the server. On the client side, you could just use plain HTML with a number of buttons, which would cause the server to take the appropriate action and regenerate the display. If you want a more sophisticated client look, then java could be used to display the cards on the client. However I suggest that only data that the player can legitimately see is transmitted to the client.

The disadvantage of using Java on the client is that not everyone has Java installed. You can get the browser to fetch it using the html tag, but this still requires a 15MB download - fine for broadband, but not for dial-up. It might be possible to do the client using Macromedia Flash, which has a wider installed base. I don’t know whether Flash has sufficient functionality for your application, but I think its worth a closer look.

The server side is where the bulk of the work (and cost) lies. You will need a fast server side program to do the donkey work. Scripted languages such as PHP won’t really cut it here when many players are involved. Either you need ‘shell’ access to the webserver, in which case you can write the server application in C++, or you could look at web hosts specialising in supporting Java Servlets. I suspect the second choice would be cheaper from a hosting point of view because you have less access to the server and thus less chance of screwing it up.

Servlets can also be used in conjunction with Java Server Pages (JSP) technology to provide back-end services for a webserver and might also be a good choice, if you decide to use HTML only on the client.

Costs are a bit of a grey area. The client isn’t too complex and could take anywhere from a week to a month to write depending on the complexity. Most Java or Flash programmers could manage this. You may want to employ an artist to do the graphics. The server is likely to be where the complexity lies, particularly if it has to handle billing (you didn’t say), in which case linking to a site providing card transaction services is required. You would need to consider security pretty seriously if user card details are stored on your server. I have no idea how to do this and suspect that those with the right knowledge won’t be particularly cheap. Here be dragons.

The other issue, if this is a commercial proposition, is to determine the extent of the market and figure out how to draw the happy punters to you site. Some of the freebies I have posted on this site (only) have had several hundred downloads, but I doubt that many of those would have converted into paying customers (even if my product was better). I guess notifying magazines of your product and some modest advertising would significantly up the throughput. I see you’re in marketing, so hopefully you’ve got a handle on this :slight_smile:

That sadly is the limit of my knowlege.