I had previously blogged about the Snakes & Ladder Game I had created. That was a multiplayer game but was not an online game – i.e. multiple people could not play the game together remotely. I had planned to make a true online and multi-player version of the game since I created the earlier version. In the last few days, I have made sufficient progress on the online version of the game, that I can share it with you. Please watch the demo of the game below.
Since I am using the same server for the backend of the game as the one hosting my blog, I have limited the number of simultaneous sessions. There is also the session timeout of 10 minutes, if there is no activity in the session.
Creating the online version was certainly more complicated than the standalone version – I had to implement the backend logic to create and manage sessions and implement a broker to facilitate messages/events to and from multiple players. But I have done sufficient server-side programming in the past and was able to implement that part of the game fairly quickly. However, implementing the game client in Unity took some time. Implementing messaging protocol, making sure the UI is updated from multiple event handlers in the UI thread and in general synchronizing parallel event handling took some time. But overall, it was a great learning experience.
You can access the same at http://ramkulkarni.com/Games/Multi-SNL/. Try this on your desktop or laptop computer and not on mobile. It is not optimized for mobile and will not work properly.
Update (15th Jan 2024): Android version is now available on Google Play Store.
-Ram