Hi all, I am NOT a game developer but a web developer as of now. I have an idea of a multiplayer online card game like UNO and I would like to understand what would be the best architecture for developing such a game.

Is unity the best platform for such a game ?

Can anyone let me know how Mattel has developed UNO game ? Are they using native java and swift to create such a game?

I am thinking of hiring game developers to have an MVP ready for it. Please guide me how should i approach in building such a game.

Thanks in advance.

For Uno, you can totally build it in a web browser. Doing so would even be a good thing, because your target market would be much bigger than a native app.

You could use messaging over websockets. Keep a server up that has some kind of process or object for each game currently running. Receive commands from the players, send known state to the other players. It's important to not send all player's hands to all players; send only the size of each player's hand to all players, and the specific hidden cards to the players that can see that state. Else some player will open the web console, or a packet sniffer, and see the data.

If you absolutely must write a native game, know that Unreal and Unity mostly focus on 3D games, but can do 2D as well. More lightweight engines like Godot are generally just as good, if not better, at 2D, and are often easier to work with for simple games. Networking in game engines either comes built-in with the engine (Unreal) or using TCP or UDP sockets, with some structure you yourself put on top. It's not as firmly structured as the HTTP protocol or Websockets, generally because the payload needs to be sent much more often (for real-time games) and the overhead of plain text and headers (and the latency of compression) is too much.

I am thinking of creating app vs web app because the main idea is to create a game and focus is going to be on UI side a lot. It's a long term project and UNO was just a reference as I personally love all the features that are there in this game.

I will read about Godot now. Also can you recommend me the engines on the basis of the ease of getting a freelancer available for it. As my project is going to be a little big, i will need to hire a team for it.

Thanks a lot for your response. I highly appreciate it.

The bigger engines have more freelancers. Unity is probably the biggest for freelancers, as it's more used for smaller games; Unreal has so far been more focused on actual employee-based studios rather than small projects (except for their inroads into architectural visualization and virtual movie sets.)

Godot also has some set of freelancers, but probably not as much as Unity.