Developing an Online Pong Game

It’s time to slowly get into some more complex aspects of making online multiplayer games. In Chapter 6, Building an Online Checkers Game, we saw how two players can share the same game world and see their actions have repercussions in the other players’ game states. This happened with players taking turns, so we didn’t have one of the most troublesome aspects of online multiplayer games involved: time.

In this chapter, we are going to start working with action games, which have hand-eye coordination and response time as their core features. We’ll start with making a replica of one of the simplest physics-based games out there: Pong. Using the base project as a starting point, we will then turn it into an online multiplayer Pong game where each player controls one paddle and the Godot Engine high-level networking features will be responsible for keeping players in sync within the same game world.

We will cover the following...