After Picnic Defender was featured on Chrome Experiments, I was solicited to write a chapter for a book on developing web-based games. The book, HTML5 Games Most Wanted, was released in April, 2012.

The choice of topic was mine, and I had just finished adding real-time multiplayer to Picnic Defender, so I decided to write a tutorial on developing a Javascript game with online multiplayer. The chapter walks through creating a bumper car game: each player controls a circular car and bouncing into another player’s car causes it to veer off its course. There are two novel things in the bumper car demo. First, the game uses WebSockets for real-time communication with the server. Second, the server is written in node.js, making it possible for the server and the client to run the same game code (computing collisions, etc.).

Last updated 20 October 2014