My First Steps on Unity Multiplayer

In another post, I intend to put some photos and link to anyone who wants to use the project. In this one, I would like to pass some considerations that I ended up taking after spending time on this project which in total was almost 100 hours of programming.

The first point to comment is that the scope of a multiplayer game becomes extremely more complex, not of the "will increase" type, but of the type that will almost double its scope. Essentially everything needs checks that a singleplayer game doesn't even come close to needing.

The second is that your testing routine needs to be much more complex and efficient. Testing a multiplayer game is quite different, even for simple things like knowing who is changing a particular object in the scene. You need to set up very well-defined test environments to speed up your time. It wasn't often that I spent hours testing a particular feature.

A good code structure is more than fundamental. Well, keeping your code optimized and structured itself is already something you need to do anyway but it gets a lot worse in a multiplayer game because if you do not, it will break a lot of head on solving problems like who should call each script at certain times. Having the well-defined structure will save you a lot of time to fix and fancy testing to find out that it was just a call hierarchy problem.

Get to know your environment or your production environments very well, or, prepare yourself very well for them. One of the big problems I had was not preparing myself for environments I didn't imagine. As for example the following, the game in question connected locally with all available mobiles and that they had the game open. On the day that it would be presented we discovered that the network configuration of the place where we were connected had a direct structure with each device. So no device could see the other. This was a huge nightmare at first, it was necessary to create a new wifi network so that everything worked correctly. Getting ready for challenges like this is really a lot of work and will spend some good hours of development. This is the big difference between a reliable and presentable prototype and MVC.

My final thoughts on having developed this are that even more multiplayer games on mobile devices are actually quite complex, but along with that comes great challenges. It's always good to stay challenged to learn more. I learned a lot about networking by developing this project, a subject I didn't know much about and now that I have felt its difficulties I am even more motivated to learn more about it.

If you have any comments to add, feel free, this text is just to show some difficulty and maybe tips that other people can use.

Thank you very much for your attention,

Ramon Ferreira