How do you make a browser oriented game?

Question

How do you make a game that everyone can play online and sign up for, but play the whole thing in their browser? I want to make a game sort of like Mafia Battle or even Envy. If you know, please tell me.

Answer 1

You'll need to choose a scripting language such as PHP or ASP.  You would most likely want to save user and game data in a database such as MySQL or MS SQL.

Some browser based games use cron jobs to manipulate the game data on certain intervals like every minute or 5 minutes or even each hour.  Some will have a program constantly running that will process the data in real time.

You will need a front end which will contain pages that will have forms to allow the player to submit actions.

Scripts will process the actions by either queuing them in the database for the controller script to process during it's main loop or by performing the actions' data manipulation itself.

This is how most browser based games operate.

One I am working on as a graphical RTS uses pretty much the same framework except the player interface is a flash swf which connects to a server application written in java and communicates via sockets.  The flash swf sends player actions to the server app which queues them.  The java server application queries the database and sends view state data back to the flash swf.  A controller application written in java runs a loop which processes all the actions in the database and updates the game data.  Players will register on the website via forms and PHP.