Godot for Research

namathos

Hi, I'm a design researcher and I've been using Godot to test out playable design artifacts. Very new to it all but learning along the way, especially since programmings not my strong point.

Before this whole Covid-19 situation happened, we had designed a physical card game to use in design workshops. We were testing it out but due to current situations aren't able to do 1-1 sessions with participants anymore. As a solution we considering on converting the card game into a digital online workshop of sorts. That way we can at least continue our project.

Here's what I have in mind: Participants logon through a web link They go through a series of exercises using the card game They input feedback along the way Data they provide gets stored somewhere (had some success with this in earlier tries but haven't been able to do it on a server) * One or multiple facilitators are present as spectators in the game

Last too points are the most important for us. I've been looking around and I've seen some examples of multiplayer Godot games with lobbies, but the schematics isn't getting through to me yet. How would we go about this? Also we've had little success in saving game data online. So far only been able to save it to text files locally. Anyone have any experience with either of these cases?

As researchers we ideally would like to keep it all open source as well. I know about Nakama and it's recently been implemented for Godot, but I haven't found much information around using it.

Any kind of advice would be highly appreciated.

Binsk

On my phone so this won't be super detailed.

Data they provide gets stored somewhere (had some success with this in earlier tries but haven't been able to do it on a server)

You will need to know something like MYSQL and PHP. MYSQL for your database and thus data storage, PHP to communicate with MYSQL and Godot. Godot can talk to your PHP code via http requests. Look into the HTTP classes in Godot and how to read POST and GET fields in PHP.

One or multiple facilitators are present as spectators in the game

Not sure if you can do this via browser yet with Godot. It is effectively your normal multiplayer setup but I think it's HTML5 export can't do this yet. ~~Could be wrong~~ (Am wrong, I misunderstood the docs). Desktop versions would have no issue.

Other than that you basically need a way for the spectators and the client to get eachother's IP so you can connect directly. Once this is done you send data back and forth directly like a normal game

Edit: I've only used 'low level' systems for multiplayer in the past. It is worth looking into Godot's systems: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/networking/high_level_multiplayer.html?highlight=tcp

namathos

Thank you Binsk!

I didn't know Godot could interact with external databases, that really opens things up for us. We probably will be looking into using Nakama to start with. I have seen HTML5 games that allow you to spectate others playing (poker etc), so the functionality is present in some form. But I think those act as separate containers in themselves rather than an option within the game. Could be wrong, this is all new ground for our team as I said.

Either way will be updating this discussion as we move along, who knows might be helpful for others.