Introducing Game Jam Multiplayer

I'm so excited to have implemented a multiplayer framework specifically aimed towards game jams!

It's called Game Jam Multiplayer (GJM).

The idea is to have a simple way to send text messages between server and client, with arguments.

It's primarily suitable for games where the server can be handled by logic in a single class, like a board game. The server doesn't know about the world, colliders etc.

Here's the current list of features:

• Support for TCP, Websockets and Secure Websockets - this allows the games to run on itch.io! 
• The server side is developed along with the client inside Unity! This allows quick iteration and shared game data.
• You can even run multiple clients in the same Unity Editor to avoid messing around with running two separate builds.
• The code you'll write is mainly 3 classes - a Client and a ConnectedClient (for the server side to keep track of the client) and a GameServer that implements the game logic.
• The GJM server can be set to require logged in users and keep track of their passwords.
  
• It will match up players that are ready to play online, and create a game server automatically.
• It will send number of online players to the clients.
• When you're happy with your game, you'll need to make a Dedicated Server build and put that on your server - luckily that is easy in Unity.
• For the game to work with itch.io (which is a secure website with https), your browser will require you to have valid certificate on your server side. 
• There is some experimental support for spawning prefabs and keeping transforms and animations updated for more real time style games. This is not fully server authoritative, but that should be fine for game jams anyway!