STATUS

I've had fun making a couple of online competitive games in the past, but when I'm done with my current project I really want to see if I can design a fun online co-op game.

I've been really into online games recently because they're such a good way to keep up with friends, and co-op is a blast! I'm curious to see if I can design a co-op game that can support players of different skill levels, too. Maybe with a few small dashes of competition, but we'll see!

/ramble ramble

Yea, for sure! It's definitely easier now than ever to make online games, but (at least with Unity) it still requires a little programming know-how. I've definitely seen some pretty cool little hobby games with online components tho, like Moirai.

No biggie, I had no idea when I started either! It's not actually too bad, but it's confusing at first, for sure.

Typically you have a host computer and one or more client computers. You can write your code in several ways - either the host has to be a separate computer independent of all the clients, or one of the clients can act as the host. For example, Starcraft 1 games are usually hosted by the player creates the lobby, and everyone else who connects is just a client. If that host drops from the game, Starcraft tries to set someone else up as the host. Typically, the host is the one making all of the gameplay calculations and decisions. It listens for input from all of the clients and returns the display for all of them.

A lot of indie games rely on the players themselves to host servers (Minecraft, Terraria) although some games, especially FPSes, keep permanent servers up hosted by the developers (like TF2's "official" servers). You can design your game's networking to work in a few different ways, depending on what works best for that audience and game!