Multiplayer games have an enormous potential to bring people together, but they can be a pain both to design and implement.

The session will start with an open design & discussion phase: What makes a good multiplayer interaction? What kind of multiplayer experience would you create that goes beyond just adversarial or cooperative?

Next we’ll dive into actually putting together a basic online multiplayer prototype in Javascript using Socket.io (https://socket.io/). The demo we’ll be making will be for the browser, but the same principles of networking your game should apply regardless of platform.

By the end of the session it will be clear that networked multiplayer isn’t as daunting as it seems and that there’s a lot of unexplored design in this area.

*Skill Level Required: Familiarity with general programming concepts required to follow along with the workshop segment.

*Install Prior to Workshop: Node.js; you can install it for free here (https://nodejs.org/en/).

ATTENDEE TAKEAWAY
“Wow, making a multiplayer game is a lot easier than I thought!” and “Someone came up with this really cool idea in the session, and now I really want to see that done, maybe I’ll try it out myself next weekend/game jam…”