As announced last time, the name of the next game will be “Chase The Shadow” – a turn-based multiplayer game, which you can play with a friend in your browser.

Preview

I hope the gif above plays well – it is a short preview of what’s currently in place.

Not much? It may look like it at first glance, but actually it is the platform for everything to build the real game!

• Names: Enter your name so others can identify you in the lobby.
• Lobby: List of all currently online players.
• Chat: Write to whoever is currently online and find someone to play a game.
• Invites: From the player list, you can click the “Play” button to invite someone to a game.

Once someone has accepted your game-invitation (or you have been invited and clicked “Yes”), the game is started and you are both forwarded to your own game-room.

This is what the short preview above is currently showing.

Technology

If you are not interested in the development side of the game, you can skip this part.

While it is very common to create such lobbies & games using Node.JS and Websockets, I wanted to have a go at it using PHP and seeing how it goes.

Everything you see in this preview is HTML5 canvas & JS in the front-end, and PHP in the back-end.

So far it is going quite well; however, I do see all the advantages that come with Node.JS and Websockets for such projects.

While in the past I have always built multiplayer games with Node.JS, I am glad to be building this one in PHP. It’s a great experience and I think the turn-based nature of the game works well with PHP.

Release

I cannot give an exact release date currently. But I do think a playable version will be ready next month, January 2018.

I will release the first playable link as soon as possible, of course!