Hearts: Multi-Player Version Launched

A multi-player version of the hearts card game website has just been launched. The basic framework is similar to the Wahoo multi-player website. The system for user registration, joining games, rematches, timeouts and time limits is almost exactly the same.

The techniques developed in the wahoo multi-player game were indispensable and laid the foundation for the hearts game development. Most notable were the ajax techniques used to send and receive the data collected from user actions and dynamically update the game page accordingly. A few years ago when I started experimenting with multiple user web interaction I discovered jQuery as a terrific tool for simplifying ajax functionality. It turned out that jQuery had a bunch of cool methods for accomplishing cross-browser tasks that made for much quicker development of both the wahoo and hearts projects.

Like Wahoo, WordPress was used as a framework to build the user registration and login system as well as other database interaction. WordPress also has its own functionality for implementing ajax on the server side and it is highly recommended to use their documented methods. This allows you to use all the various WordPress functions for interacting with the database and all development can easily be done within your theme and plugin files.

There is no doubt that the development of the Wahoo multi-player site paved the way for the hearts site but there were definitely a few unforeseen and interesting challenges along the way.

Visit the Hearts Multi-Player Website