Chapter 1, Getting Started with Multiplayer Game Programming, introduces network programming, with emphasis on designing a multiplayer game. It illustrates the basic concepts of multiplayer game development by walking you through the creation of a real-time game of Tic Tac Toe.

Chapter 2, Setting Up the Environment, describes the current state of the art in the JavaScript development world, including JavaScript in the server through Node.js. It also describes the current techniques to manage the development cycle in JavaScript with workflow and resource management tools, such as Npm, Bower, Grunt, and more.

Chapter 3, Feeding a Snake in Real Time, takes an existing single-player Snake game and builds in the ability to play with multiple players in the same game world using the tools heretofore described. Concepts of lobby, rooms, matchmaking, and handling queries from users are also described and demonstrated, which add the functionality to the Snake game. The chapter introduces the most powerful and widely used WebSocket abstraction in the industry today—socket.io.

Chapter 4, Reducing Network Latency, teaches you techniques to reduce network latency in order to create a smooth playing experience. The most common among such techniques—client prediction—is demonstrated and incorporated into the Snake game that is described in the previous chapter. The game server code is also updated for the purpose of performance by introducing a second update loop.

Chapter 5, Leveraging the Bleeding Edge, describes the exciting opportunities that are found in game development on the web platform. It explains WebRTC, HTML5's gamepad, the fullscreen mode, and media capture APIs. Other promised and experimental technologies and APIs are also described here.

Chapter 6, Adding Security and Fair Play, covers common flaws and security vulnerabilities that are associated with network gaming. Here, common techniques are described and demonstrated, allowing you to develop games that provide a playing experience that is free from cheating.

To use this book, you will need a working installation of Node.js and Npm, a modern web browser (such as Google Chrome 5.0, Firefox 3.5, Safari 5.0, or Internet Explorer 9.0 and their later versions), and a text editor or an integrated development environment (IDE). You will also need basic to intermediate JavaScript knowledge as well as some previous game programming experience, preferably in JavaScript and HTML5.

This book is targeted at HTML5 game developers who can make basic single player games and would now like to learn how to incorporate multiplayer functionality in their HTML5 games as quickly as possible.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " The first will be keyed with the value of action and the second will have a key of data."

A block of code is set as follows:

wss.on('connection', function connection(ws) {
    board.on(Board.events.PLAYER_CONNECTED, function(player) {
        wss.clients.forEach(function(client) {
            board.players.forEach(function(player) {
                client.send(makeMessage(events.outgoing.JOIN_GAME, player));

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

validator.isEmail('[email protected]'); //=> true
validator.isBase64(inStr);
validator.isHexColor(inStr);
validator.isJSON(inStr);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

npm install socket.io --save
npm install socket.io-client –save

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