I’m planning on making a multiplayer GPS based game where you conquer territories. My question is, can this be achieved with Corona by a person with minimal coding knowledge? 2D graphics, no fancy stuff. The world is your graphics, you only get a showing territories and stuff. What would be the costs involved in hosting this, if any?
No, I don’t think someone with minimal coding skills can write a server based multi-player game.
Multi-player games are exceedingly challenging to write and easy to under-estimate the difficulty of.
If one is starting from zero or near zero, I don’t see how this can be feasible.
Also, while getting GPS coordinates are easy and going math on GPS positions is relatively simple, doing difficult stuff like figuring out what a ‘territory’ is… not so simple.
However, the tools are out there. For example, you could host a Coronium server to $5 a month + traffic costs on Digital Ocean.
PS - I don’t want to be a downer here. I just don’t want you to think this is easy.
However, if you’re willing to invest time to ramp up on:
-
Lua
-
Corona
-
Server setup and creation on DigitalOcean or Amazon
-
Coronium Server or Coronium GS
-
Mongo or MySQL
-
… art tools, editors, and various other sundries
Then, you will eventually be able to do this.
I’ve heard multiplayer games are hard. Thanks for your answer. I’ll start low, doing simple games I guess. You said territories are hard. Instead of checking if a player is within a territory, maybe I’d better off checking if the player is at most X meters away from a set point in the territory, a flag pole. Could that work?
If this is done then really Important for gpsmultiplayer game, Lua and Corona through this you can do this thing but mainly important is graphic.
Great idea. Start small, get the experience you need and ramp up. Don’t be afraid to aim high, but also be realistic so you don’t get frustrated or disappointed. There is no limit, but you will have to work for it.
As far as territories. Doing the math for an arbitrarily shaped area is hard, especially if it is concave. Doing a mere radius check is easy. I’d start with the latter and work up to non-circular regions.
-Ed
One final question, this kind of multiplayer should be the easiest, right? The players don’t have any interaction in real time, like they would in an FPS. They just get information from the server, to know which territories are ocupied by who and send, when they want to do an action. There is no player1 killed player2 kind of interaction.
It’s not hard hard like fps games but it is hard.
You should start out by making games like flappy bird or angry birds and get those down and understand everything and then you could go and start making small multiplayer games 
Try this site out for a start:
coronatemplates.tk
Good Luck!
Yes and no. Even turn based games suffer from difficult problems. One of the most difficult issues I’ve had to deal with regarding multi-play games, is handling the accurate updating of common records. i.e. Records that more than one user can update or cause to be updated as a side-effect of some action.
Don’t say your game won’t have any, because it will. Maybe not a lot, but it will. So, when you jump into this. Ask yourself, these questions:
-
What do I expect to happen if two transactions come in to modify this record at or near the same time?
-
How will I handle it?
-
Does the system/solution I’m using give me a way to handle this cleanly?
No, I don’t think someone with minimal coding skills can write a server based multi-player game.
Multi-player games are exceedingly challenging to write and easy to under-estimate the difficulty of.
If one is starting from zero or near zero, I don’t see how this can be feasible.
Also, while getting GPS coordinates are easy and going math on GPS positions is relatively simple, doing difficult stuff like figuring out what a ‘territory’ is… not so simple.
However, the tools are out there. For example, you could host a Coronium server to $5 a month + traffic costs on Digital Ocean.
PS - I don’t want to be a downer here. I just don’t want you to think this is easy.
However, if you’re willing to invest time to ramp up on:
-
Lua
-
Corona
-
Server setup and creation on DigitalOcean or Amazon
-
Coronium Server or Coronium GS
-
Mongo or MySQL
-
… art tools, editors, and various other sundries
Then, you will eventually be able to do this.
I’ve heard multiplayer games are hard. Thanks for your answer. I’ll start low, doing simple games I guess. You said territories are hard. Instead of checking if a player is within a territory, maybe I’d better off checking if the player is at most X meters away from a set point in the territory, a flag pole. Could that work?
If this is done then really Important for gpsmultiplayer game, Lua and Corona through this you can do this thing but mainly important is graphic.
Great idea. Start small, get the experience you need and ramp up. Don’t be afraid to aim high, but also be realistic so you don’t get frustrated or disappointed. There is no limit, but you will have to work for it.
As far as territories. Doing the math for an arbitrarily shaped area is hard, especially if it is concave. Doing a mere radius check is easy. I’d start with the latter and work up to non-circular regions.
-Ed
One final question, this kind of multiplayer should be the easiest, right? The players don’t have any interaction in real time, like they would in an FPS. They just get information from the server, to know which territories are ocupied by who and send, when they want to do an action. There is no player1 killed player2 kind of interaction.
It’s not hard hard like fps games but it is hard.
You should start out by making games like flappy bird or angry birds and get those down and understand everything and then you could go and start making small multiplayer games
Try this site out for a start:
coronatemplates.tk
Good Luck!
Yes and no. Even turn based games suffer from difficult problems. One of the most difficult issues I’ve had to deal with regarding multi-play games, is handling the accurate updating of common records. i.e. Records that more than one user can update or cause to be updated as a side-effect of some action.
Don’t say your game won’t have any, because it will. Maybe not a lot, but it will. So, when you jump into this. Ask yourself, these questions:
-
What do I expect to happen if two transactions come in to modify this record at or near the same time?
-
How will I handle it?
-
Does the system/solution I’m using give me a way to handle this cleanly?