Carry Small, Game Large

Do portable games have to be small? Find the answer in a soon-to-be-published article of the same name on Gamasutra (check the Graphics Community for a link to the article once it's published). In the meantime, have a look at the description below and download the code here.

The ‘carry small, game large’ code is a multiplayer game framework built with web technologies. The framework allows for the creation of multiplayer games where a single common screen is visible to all players. All that is required for players to join a game is a web browser. This code also contains two sample games built on top of this framework. We are making this code available for all to use and experiment with and we hope to hear back from anyone that tries it out.

The code consists of three main directories: framework, puzzle, tanks. The ‘framework’ directory contains files used by both sample games. The puzzle and tanks directories contain files that make up each of the sample games. These three directories should be dropped into a location on the filesystem accessible to the web server. They should be on the same level on the filesystem. To play, open up either puzzle/shared.php or tanks/shared.php in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Players join the game by going to puzzle/index.php or tanks/index.php using the browser on their device. As players join the game, their characters appear on the shared.php being displayed.

Dependencies
The machine hosting the files should be running:
Apache 2.2.3 or higher
PHP 5.2.1 or higher
PEAR 1.4.11 or higher
PEAR MDB2 2.4.0 or higher
PEAR MDB2_Driver_mysql 1.4.0 or higher
The sample games have two dependencies that need to be downloaded and placed into the framework/script directory:
jQuery (http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery)
JSON parser/stringifier (http://www.json.org/json2.js)