Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
When a player is in the lobby, the player constantly receives updates that happen
within the lobby. For example, events such as new room creation, deletion, and
room-related updates. The room-related updates include the players joining or
leaving the room and the room status changing from waiting to playing.
A sophisticated lobby design lets a player delay switching to the room screen until
the game starts. This is done so as to not have a player feel all alone once they
create a room and get inside it. In this design, the player can still view activities in
the lobby, and there's an opportunity for players to change their mind and jump to
another table (game room) instantaneously.
The lobby screen may also provide a chatting interface. The players will be able to
view all the players in the lobby and even make friends.
Note that the lobby for a popular game may include thousands of players. The
server may be bogged down by sending updates to all the players in the lobby. As
an advanced optimization, various pagination schemes may be adopted where the
player only receives updates from only a certain set of rooms that is currently being
viewed on the screen.
In some cases, lobbies are organized into various categories to lessen the player traffic
and thus the load on the server. Some of the ways you may want to break down the
lobbies are based on player levels, game genres, and geographic location, etc.
The lobbies are most often statically designed, meaning a player may not create a
lobby on the fly.
The server's responsibility is to keep track of all the players in the lobby and dispatch
them with all events related to lobby and room activity.
The rooms that are managed within a lobby may be created dynamically or
sometimes statically. In a statically created room, the players simply occupy them,
play the game, and then leave. Also in this design, the game shows with a bunch of
empty rooms, say, one hundred of them. If all rooms are currently in play state, then
the player needs to wait to join a room that is in a wait state and is open to accepting
a new player into the room.
