Hello,

I am completely new to multiplayer and beginning the programming of a multiplayer game. My Google and forum search abilities might be lacking because I can't find anything like this type of multiplayer.

This is a 1v1 game where each player can take as many turns as they like to complete the game (not turn based per se). They need to be able to leave the game without closing the room and return where they left off (not real-time either). Each player should also be able to see the other players progress. Think of it like a scrabble free-for-all, where each player can place words on the board without regard to whose turn it is.

Is there an asynchronous game server out there that can support this style of multiplayer? I am looking for something that can do all the user tracking, matching, ranking, and notifying that gamecenter/photon/app42/others can do. I have not delved in to Photon or app42's SDKs yet so it may be possible using their asynchronous turn based game servers. Gamecenter's turn-based gaming doesn't seem to jive unless I set each clients response to a completed turn to do nothing. I just don't know if that will cause a glitch. So second question, will an asynchronous turn based server support this style of play?

I realize this could probably be built separately and manually but I am trying keep the back-end server services consolidated.

I am a noob so I could be missing something obvious. Thank you for any insight you can provide.

Adam

The more "integrated" you want the system, rather than "roll your own from pieces," the more likely you are to go to existing pay-for services.

If your game is largely mobile-based, then what you want is probably a mobile platform like Parse. (There are a few others -- think Gamedonia etc.)

If your concern is more around server hosting, then a platform like Google App Engine, Amanzon Web Services, or perhaps Joyent, might be able to work for you. That won't do game-specific things like matchmaking out of the box, though.

If your concern is simply to get some solid tools to build your own system, you could do worse than Redis for pub/sub, Node.js for the web interface part, and perhaps MySQL or Cassandra for backing data store (you don't want all bulk data in Redis for cost reasons.) This won't give you any target-specific features like mobile notification or the like -- you'd have to build all of those yourself.

Hi Adam,

You should check out Shephertz's services. Shephertz provides lot of services. Two of them are App42 and AppWarp. App42 contains all the features for your game's backend requirements . App42 supports leaderboards, storage service, push notifications, etc. And other service is AppWarp which is a real time multiplayer game engine. AppWarp already has support for rooms, lobby, matchmaking and special APIs for turn based games.

Thanks