taro VS bullet-mania

Context: I’ve been working on Moddio (www.modd.io) for a few years and I’ve always been really proud of building something for indie devs. Our game engine is open-source, free, and is particularly designed for beginners. Most of our users come in with zero coding experience and have never touched a game engine before. My proudest moment has been hearing users tell me that they learned how to code, and even went on to try and become professional game devs, because of Moddio.

maybe give my visual scripting language a try: www.modd.io

If you just want to dive into game making and not as much programming, check out modd.io

https://www.modd.io/ (Designer and non-programmer focused)

www.modd.io is free and has multiplayer built in

Props to your son for being interested in game dev! As someone else here said, one of the hardest things about game development is that it's slow and hard to get started. That's really difficult, especially for younger people who want to see an impact right away, otherwise they get discouraged building. I'd recommend either trying to mod games, or trying something like Minecraft or Roblox. The advantage of the latter two are that he'll also find like-minded developers, around his own age, which would help with motivation. I also wanted to toot my own horn, I've been building a website (www.modd.io) which is no-code and easier to get started building games. He could use a template and have a game online in 1 minute, and players can join - this tends to help with that "magic moment" of getting started. I'm happy to help out too if you have any questions!

I also wanted to toot my own horn a bit and share a tool I've been working on - www.modd.io which is a browser based game development platform. It has drag and drop coding and multiplayer features built in, so it's easier for beginners to get started.

Hi everyone! I'm part of a small team at Moddio, a game development platform, and wanted to share a new game: Temple of Secrets

https://www.modd.io/ (Designer and non-programmer focused)

Bullet Mania, a demo game to showcase building scalable multiplayer games with Hathora We know that building multiplayer games can feel nearly impossible for indie game developers. Bullet Mania showcases how simple it can be to build scalable, production-ready games with Hathora. Bullet Mania is completely open source and is able to scale to thousands of matches just by deploying on Hathora Cloud and integrating with Hathora’s SDK. It utilizes our new Lobby Service APIs to make integration even more streamlined. Check out our step-by-step guide to get started: Bullet Mania.

If latency is a concern, you probably need a backend that can handle websocket connections as well as UDP connections from Unity clients (possible I am misunderstanding your game's setup). A game-focused hosting solution like Hathora would be a good fit here because you will be able to minimize latency and get access to APIs that are made for game developers. Here's an open-source tutorial game that shows a multiplayer web game running on Hathora (disclosure: I am a founding engineer at Hathora). We also have a Unity plugin launching later this week, I can notify you when I launches if you have interest.

If you happen to prefer looking through a fully functional game with a working lobby system, you can check out this tutorial game I worked on: https://github.com/hathora/bullet-mania

I listed those in order of player base size requirements. If your player base is small or new, then private matches are the best place to start. I recently launched a demo game that is aimed to help indies build this functionality

If you want to build multiplayer games, here's a fully open-source game with a step-by-step guide that I worked on: https://bullet-mania.netlify.app/

I am currently working on a tool to help make it even easier for indies to make multiplayer games. Just launched a fully open-source web game tutorial, and I am working on a Godot tutorial next. I can update you when that tutorial is ready!