Someone on my team had the genius idea of making our game multiplayer. I would hate that person if I wasn't on a one-man team.

The basic idea of my game is it's a 2 player tower defense style game, where both teams have to build troops and defenses, and the first to kill the others home base wins. One side will be the alien invasionists, the other side will have castles. The attackers will have some kind of path-finding system, like clash of clans.

It is my general strategy to get something playable on the first day, and work the rest of the week on polish. This time, sockets get in the way. Instead of the general client-server architecture, I need a symmetric system where both sides sent data to each other in the same way, and a third party can not join. At first, I tried using the python socketserver library. Both clients would start a server on startup, and prompt for a IP address. If you typed a address and pressed enter, the client would shut down the server and connect to the other server. The whole system was encapsulated and exposed only send, receive, and connect methods. The rest of the program did not care if it was client or server.

There was one problem, however: Socketserver could not keep open connections. I could send messages from the client to the server anytime, but I could only send a message back as a reply. This was of course, unusable as no message might be passed for a few seconds, so a signal could come way late.

I had found a answer earlier on stack overflow that used the sockets module directly as a server. At first, this seemed overly complicated, but having exhausted the earlier approach, and realized that using the same module for both client and server might save effort in the long run, I decided to go for that idea. I deleted all references to socketserver, and replaced them with copy-pasted code blocks from the answer, some of which I barely understood. The code I copied returned a new socket for every client. Since I need only one client, I decided to just delete the server and use this client object as soon as the connection was established.

I then spent some hours figuring out why messages where being passed from one direction but not from the other, untill I suddently found that my recv() call was inside a if (self.mode==CLIENT) block. So much wasted time.

Finally, I got both clients to sync state, as seen on the screenshot:

Hopefully, tomorrow I will actually get some game mechanics done. Hopefully my system will not break outside a local computer. Hopefully, I can fix those ghastly castle sprites.