The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0

Level up your Godot 4 networking skills with the only comprehensive multiplayer guide written by experienced game designer and developer, Henrique Campos, featuring dedicated servers and persistent worlds, illustrated with key images in color

Key Features

• Ensure player synchronization and coexistence in a game world
• Mitigate latency in your multiplayer games to design a seamless shared experience
• Optimize and debug your games using profilers and monitors to visualize performance
• Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free PDF eBook

Book Description

The Essential Guide to Creating Multiplayer Games with Godot 4.0 guides you in exploring the built-in network API for online multiplayer games, offering practical knowledge through concrete use cases.

Throughout the book, you'll assume the role of a network engineer in a fictional indie game studio, tackling real-world requests from your peers and gaining expertise in adding new network features to the studio's games. Following step-by-step instructions, you’ll go from making your first network handshake to optimizing online gameplay. You’ll learn how to sync players and pass data over the internet as you add online multiplayer features to a top-down shooter adventure game.

This book puts you in a fictional game project team where you set up your first online server before advancing to creating an online chat system and transitioning local gameplay to go online. With a focus on implementing multiplayer features, you’ll create shared world adventures and learn optimization techniques to allow more players to join your virtual world.

By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to set up a client-server network, implement remote procedure calls (RPCs), sync node properties remotely, and optimize your games to create smooth online multiplayer experiences.

What you will learn

• Understand the fundamentals of networking and remote data exchange between computers
• Use the Godot game engine's built-in API to set up a network for players
• Master remote procedure calls and learn how to make function calls on objects remotely
• Enhance your GDScript proficiency to get the most out of this powerful language
• Explore industry-standard solutions for common online multiplayer challenges
• Improve your networking skills and discover how to turn single-player games into multiplayer experiences

Who this book is for

If you’re involved in game development with Godot and want to add multiplayer capabilities to enrich the shared gaming experience, then this book is for you. You’ll also find this book useful if you’re a network engineer looking to gain hands-on experience with practical projects. To get the most out of this book, a prior understanding of the Godot Engine design philosophy, the GDScript programming language, the SceneTree structure, and how nodes work is essential.

Table of Contents

1. Setting up a server for multiplayer game
2. Sending and receiving data
3. Making a lobby to gather players together
4. Creating an online chat
5. Making an online quiz game
6. Building an online checkers game
7. Developing an online Pong
8. Designing an online co-op platformer
9. Creating a top-down adventure game
10. Debugging and profiling the network
11. Optimizing data requests
12. Implementing prediction and interpolation
13. Caching data to decrease bandwidth

Henrique Campos is an indie game developer and game designer working in the industry since 2015. Starting as a University teacher in the Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence chairs and working for the GDQuest team from 2018 to 2022, he has also been providing consultancy for solo developers, studios, and schools.

Under the alias of Pigdev, Henrique has been creating game development content on his YouTube channel since 2016. Among his projects, he wrote the Top 7 Godot Engine Recipes and the Platformer Essential Recipes ebooks where he presents design patterns that people can use to make games with the Godot Engine. A passionate open-source enthusiast, Henrique has been working and contributing to the Godot Engine project since 2016.