Make a multiplayer card game - Episode 1 | Create a simple server and client from scratch

In the coming weeks, I'll be updating a series of tutorials on making a multiplayer online card games base on the rule of the most popular Chinese card game “Doudizhu”, which means battle with landlord. I divide this series in many small part to make it easy for most friends. If you know a little javascript, all the better.

Parts including:

• create a simple server and client
• play cards in terminal with bots
• communicate with server by protobuf
• play cards in terminal with other players
• create 2D graphical interface with Cocos Creator
• create 2D graphical interface with React
• create 3D graphical interface with Three.js
• add physical lib ammo.js to add a tiny game
• connect to Web3 world

open your terminal, input node -v, if something go wrong, please install node.js first https://nodejs.org.

directory structure :

create a server, server/index.js:

 const net = require('net');

const server = net.createServer((socket) => {
    socket.on('data', (data) => {
        handlerData(socket, data)
    });
});

function handlerData(socket, data) {
    send(socket, {'msg':'Welcome, friend.'});
}

function send(socket, data) {
    let bufferData = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify(data));
    socket.write(bufferData);
}

server.listen(8080, () => {
    console.log("server listening on 127.0.0.1:8080")
});

create client, client/index.js:

const net = require('net');
const socket = new net.Socket();

socket.connect({
    host: '127.0.0.1',
    port: 8080
}, onConnected);

socket.on('data', (buffer) => {
    decode(buffer);
})
socket.on('error', (buffer) => {
    console.log(buffer);
});

function onConnected() {
    startGame();
}

function decode(data) {
    console.log(JSON.parse(data).msg);
}

function request(data) {
    const bufferData = Buffer.from(JSON.stringify({ 'msg': data }));
    socket.write(bufferData);
}

function startGame() {
    request('Hello, world!')
}

run :

cd server

node index.js

cd client

node index.js

result:

This episode is end here, the complete demo can be found on https://github.com/lizhiyu-me/Make-a-multiplayer-card-game/tree/episode1

Any problems, discussion is welcome.

In the next section, we will add the logic of Doudizhu game, and you will have completed a playable game in your terminal.

Thanks for your reading.