Now is time to stop playing alone and invite someone else to come by and play. It has been an interesting experience to think in terms of a multiuser experience and not just about one user interacting with the application. It is like a chatting experience, you have a room where users enter and communicate among them. In this case is a little bit different, I wanted the users to interact somehow using an avatar instead of using words. In order to do this I used Robin, it is a Flash/PHP Multiuser Solution that enables you to create a client-server application. The good thing of this open source library is that you don’t need to worry about the server, you just send and receive information through the Robin class. You can find detailed information and some good examples of how to use it in .
I end up creating a “Magvatar”, an avatar with magnet arms. The idea is that each user that enters the application can interact with others just dragging his magvatar near other to either snap or repel depending on the position of magnets’ poles of the arms. The This is can look like a very simple application but I had some hard time trying to make work correctly the interaction between the magvatars. Take look at it:
You need to be very careful when you design the interaction for the users inside your application and even more careful when you code it. You can have performance issues if you send more data to the server than the strictly needed; because you would have to refresh your application a lot and end consuming too many resources from your computer and the server.
Here are some interesting samples related to this topic:
