Building Multiplayer HTML5 Games: Challenges and Solutions

 Multiplayer games allow players to participate in simultaneous gameplay, either cooperatively or competitively. While these games provide multiple advantages like enhanced replayability and increased social interaction, they introduce unique challenges to address. This blog explores the key challenges that come along the way to building HTML5 games and their solutions to help you ease your next multiplayer game development project.

Do you know what is common between Slither.io, Diep.io, and Wormax? They’re top-rated examples of multiplayer HTML5 games. These games provide numerous benefits such as social interaction, competitive challenge, enhanced engagement, and foster connection along with offering a single platform to elevate players’ social skills.

Multiplayer games tend to be casual or highly competitive, providing a broader spectrum of gaming experience as per the player’s performance. Although building multiplayer games with HTML introduces an unmatched set of advantages, it also presents some challenges throughout the development lifecycle.

From real-time communication and collaboration to server management and more, building multiplayer HTML5 games involves various challenges. This blog drives you through the challenges that come when you build HTML5 games along with their solutions, enabling you to navigate multiplayer game development conveniently.

What Is a Multiplayer Game and Why Are They Popular?

Multiplayer games are the kind of games that allow multiple players to interact and play games together in a common gaming world. This interaction might take a variety of forms, for example, competitive matches, online social experiences, and cooperative play. They provide several benefits to gamers and, hence, have gained traction in recent years. The following are the benefits of making multiplayer games popular among gamers:

Benefits of Multiplayer Games:

• Social Interaction: Multiplayer games allow players to socialize and connect with friends and fellow gamers, fostering a sense of community and togetherness.
• Diverse Variety: Multiplayer game genres tend to be diverse, which means there’s always something special for gamers, such as role-playing adventures, shooters, etc.
• Competitive Challenge: Multiplayer games allow game enthusiasts to enjoy a competitive and engaging gaming experience against their opponents, gauging their skills and strategies.
• Social Skill Enhancement: Multiplayer games help players enhance their in-person social skills such as meeting new people, participating in social interactions, coordinating and cooperating with people as well as managing a small group.

Multiplayer Game Development Statistics

Unity surveyed more than 1,500 multiplayer gamers in the UK, USA, Korea, and Japan, intending to gather data for improvement in multiplier games. According to the report:

• Around 52% of the population play games, 77% of which play multiplayer games.
• 91% of real-time gamers prefer to play crossplay games.

Significant features gamers reported enjoying in a multiplayer game:

• 56% of gamers like creating chat parties in-game.
• 31% of game players prefer using separate software and only 13% of respondents liked out-of-game options.

The stats above showcase the impact of multiplayer games along with user’s preferences. It helps you know what to do before moving toward multiplayer game development.

Multiplayer HTML5 Game Development: Challenges and Solutions

Now that we have come to know the basics and statistics about multiplayer games, let’s skip to the key discussion point where we will be exploring the major challenges faced by multiplayer HTML5 game developers & their solutions. It will allow you to know the challenges and solutions beforehand to tackle them with ease and convenience.

Real-Time Communication & Collaboration

Challenge:

Ensuring real-time communication and collaboration among gamers is one of the key challenges with multiplayer HTML5 game development. Achieving low-latency communication and data consistency tends to be a major complexity for developers.

Solution:

Using WebSocket can be the right solution to ensure real-time communication in HTML5 games. WebSockets allows full-duplex communication channels on a single TCP connection that provides a low-latency option to traditional HTTP polling. Employing WebSocket servers allows efficient, bidirectional communication between the game server and game client (player’s device), making sure the game state updates are shared in real time.

Furthermore, frameworks such as Socket.io offer a higher-level abstraction for WebSockets, easing the implementation and adding additional features such as fallback and automated reconnection options.

Network Latency and Synchronization

Challenge:

In multiplayer games, players need to see and interact with the game world consistently, making it essential to ensure lower network latency and synchronization. Although it’s crucial, achieving lower network latency (the delay between action and delay) and synchronization across several devices and networks in multiplayer games is more likely to be a complex task.

Solution:

To mitigate latency, implementing server reconciliation and client-side prediction is the way to go. Server reconciliation tends to correct discrepancies between client and server states, while client-side prediction enables players to see the immediate responses resulting from their actions.

Using techniques like lag compensation helps make adjustments to the game state to deal with latency and boost the user experience. Besides, making use of networking libraries competent to handle packet loss and out-of-order messages elevates the overall robustness of the game.

Data Transfer & Bandwidth

Challenge:

Multiplayer games need frequent data exchange between the game server and gamers that rely on network bandwidth. Optimizing this procedure is essential to mitigate the bandwidth uses and ensure seamless gameplay, however, it may be one of the major challenges of multiplayer game development.

Solution:

To deal with this challenge, game developers need to use network compression techniques intending to reduce the amount of data sent between the game servers and the client. It allows for saving bandwidth while ensuring a smoother gaming experience.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Challenge:

Ensuring a multiplayer HTML5 game runs smoothly across different platforms and devices is challenging. This is because of the variety in browser implementation and their supporting competencies for HTML5 games.

Solution:

Consider cross-browser development and testing practices for optimized compatibility. Using feature detection libraries such as Modernizr can come in handy to handle discrepancies between browsers and provide fallbacks wherever needed. Besides, make use of a game engine or framework that can abstract away browser differences and provide a consistent API across different platforms.

Furthermore, it is crucial to perform frequent testing of the game on different browsers and devices to pinpoint compatibility issues.

User Interface and User Experience

Challenge:

In multiplayer games, designing intuitive interfaces for seamless interactions across various devices is essential. But it is easier said than done, as it is one of the key challenges.

Solution:

Creating a responsive and user-friendly interface capable of adapting to different screen sizes and resolutions can make a difference in making UI/UX exceptional. Game designers use responsive design principles and test your game’s UI on a variety of devices to ensure usability. Incorporating feedback mechanisms, for instance, in-game chat or support features, can help enhance gamer engagement and address issues promptly.

Furthermore, paying extra attention to performance optimization can help make the game run smoothly across different devices, limiting lag and enhancing overall player satisfaction and experience.

Excellent Game Balancing

Challenge:

Game balancing ensures players get equal opportunities and chances of winning irrespective of their selected characters, competencies, or strategies. If a single team or player is disproportionately stronger, it tends to lead to frustration, or in a worst-case scenario disengagement from others. Hence, game balancing in a multiplayer game is quite an intricate task.

Solution:

Achieving appropriate game balancing tends to be an ongoing procedure. For this, game developers keep monitoring gameplay data, accumulate player feedback, and release continual updates to tweak character competencies, weapon stats, and other elements. Doing so helps them maintain optimal fairness in the game.

Enhanced Scalability

Challenge:

Multiplayer games range from small-scale matches to huge online worlds with hundreds and thousands of concurrent gamers. Building a system capable of accommodating this large spectrum of players is challenging. It tends to strain server resources, hence, designing a server infrastructure and netcode to handle these varieties of loads is a must.

Solution:

Using a distributed architecture with load balancing is the right solution to address this issue. It allows developers to use techniques such as sharding to separate the game world into smaller segments. It allows efficient management of the player load by separating and distributing connections across servers.

Game developers can make use of cloud services like Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure that provide scalable infrastructure with the capability to automatically adjust the resources as per demand. Furthermore, leveraging containerization technologies like Docker helps simplify the deployment and scaling of game server instances.

Robust Security

Challenge:

Multiplayer games are susceptible to different types of attacks, such as data breaches, cheating, as well as denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Dealing with these security concerns is one of the major challenges of multiplayer HTML5 game development.

Solution:

Game developers should implement robust security measures to reduce cheating and ensure a secure and user-friendly gaming experience. Game developers can make use of HTTPS, allowing them to encrypt data transmitted between servers and clients, ensuring complete protection against interception and tampering.

Developers can use server-side validation in order to prevent cheating and ensure the game logic is securely managed on the server side. Updating and patching the game and server software helps conveniently address known vulnerabilities. Furthermore, they employ security services and tools for comprehensive monitoring and protection against malicious activities and attacks.

Let 300Mind Tackle Your HTML5 Game Development Roadblocks!

300Mind is a leading HTML5 game development company that provides comprehensive solutions to those in need. Right from game designing, development, and upgradation, or you need just a consultation session, we’re all ears, listening to your multiplayer HTML5 game development challenges and fixing them with our tailored solutions.

If you have a game development idea that you want to turn into a unique game, get in touch with our experts, share the specific multiplayer HTML5 game development idea, and we’ll provide you with all-encompassing solutions with enriched quality assurance.

FAQs on Multiplayer HTML5 Games