I managed to have a nice relaxed Christmas and New Year. I didn't get as much time to work on my game as I'd hoped, but it was actually nice to put down the tools and enjoy being offline for a bit. It was energising.

So, between that new energy and the fact that last week's post was to formerly introduce the game to you all, I've got a fairly meaty update for you all.

Networking rework

Many of the following changes are a knock-on effect of this change, so it seemed like a good place for me to start this update.

My medium-term goal with this project to build a small area where I can build and test all of my functionality, such as walking around, picking up items and interacting with objects.

If I'm going to build a multiplayer game though, I'd need to have changes reflect across clients. For example, if John picks up an item, that item needs to disappear from Jane's game.

I already had networking and visuals as two separate proof-of-concept projects, but now it was time to bring together everything I had learned into a new, clean project.

When I started this project, I made the decision to write the server-side code with PHP. If you're a coder, you might've cringed at that statement, so let me justify it a little.

• PHP has improved a lot in the last decade, it's fast and community support is great.
• I use PHP for my day-to-day job and as such know it back to front. Anything I can use to reduce my game dev learning curve is a win.
• PHP fundamentally is a server-side language and so whilst I'm not using it for HTTP, I know it can do all the things I need it to do.

But, with this new clean project, I decided to drop PHP. The reason for this was that client and server applications have a lot of shared code. If you're writing them in the same language, you can break lots of components out into a shared library.

So, instead, I decided to rewrite my server code in GDScript. I'm not convinced that I'll stick with this - but until I have more time, I'll go with this for now.

More on networking further down...

New repo structure

This section is for the "how do I structure my project" people.

In the spirit of starting as I mean to go on, I wanted this shiny, new and clean project to be set-up "right" from the get-go. This would save me time later on.

In my prototypes, I had a repo called client and a repo called server. The client contained the game and everything the player would interact with and server contained the back-end "thinking" part of the game.

Without PHP, I realised I could now have shared code, so I created a third repo called common. I use symlinks to add my common code into both repos. It looked like this:

• project
  • server
    • link to common
  • client
    • link to common
  • common

Once I'd created these repos, it felt really neat, so I kept thinking about it some more. I've known for a while that my project is going to need tools for me to actually create the game.

I've had a bare-bones project called WorldBuilder (stuffed into my Server project) for a while that I've been using to generate content for the world, so I created a dedicated repo called worldbuilder to house this.

WorldBuilder uses assets (textures and models) that are used by my client, so I broke my assets out into another repo, so that now my project looked like this:

• project
  • server
    • link to common
    • link to assets
  • client
    • link to common
  • common
  • worldbuilder
    • link to common
    • link to assets
  • assets

Finally, the WorldBuilder does one more thing. It creates resources. In Godot, resources are like classes that you can instantiate and save.

For example, let's say you have an NPC named "Bob". You would instantiate the NPC resource, give it a name and save it to file.

Later on, I want to find a more efficient storage solution than Godot's resource files, but for now it's fine.

So, I created a resources repo for all my static data. Client, Server and WorldBuilder projects all need to refer to resources, so the final project structure looks like this:

• project
  • server
    • link to common
    • link to assets
    • link to resources
  • client
    • link to common
    • link to resources
  • common
  • worldbuilder
    • link to common
    • link to assets
    • link to resources
  • assets
  • resources

With this all set up nicely, it was time to start bringing parts of my prototypes into my new project.

Basic networking

I needed to start my server-side networking code again - as I wasn't using PHP - so I got started on it. I wrote the two main pieces of code first.

Server This is the "behind the scenes" processing that happens in multiplayer games. The short version is that it accepts connections from players and communicates what is happening in the game to them.

Client This is the part of the code that the player receives when they download the game. It establishes a connection with the server, sends messages when actions are performed and responds appropriately to messages from the server, e.g. adding an item to your inventory.

In addition to these two pieces, I also wrote a "Packet" class. The purpose of class is to collect data in a standard way and then pack it down into a format that can be communicated to the server.

I wrote a few basic packets to get me started.

• Handshake
• Login
• Select character
• Add to player list

The first few are self-explanatory, but the last one is important. When you log in, an "add player to list" packet is sent to all other players and effectively adds you to their "list" with some information about you.

That way, when that player does something in the game, we don't have to send all the information about you down again.

Doing this enabled the next packet, and the final part of this update.

Chatting

The final thing I added was "chatting". That is, the ability to write a message and have everyone else see it.

When you send a message, a packet is created and sent to the server. That packet is then distributed to everyone on your player list. As a player, when you receive a message, it's displayed in the chat box and above the player who spoke's head.

With the technical work for this done, players could log in, see a placeholder representation of other players and chat with them in real-time.

There's a nice little video of this in action over on Bluesky.

Parting thoughts

Bringing all my prototypes together, setting up my basic networking and setting up chatting represents what I'm calling v0.1 of my project.

It's not available to download, and won't be until I'm further along in this process, but it feels like a massive achievement.

If you're enjoying these posts, likes and comments make be feel all warm and fuzzy, so please do that if you like.

I'll be back next week though with the next DevLog where I add some styling and objects to my world.

~ Sam