Game Lobby in PHP/MySQL

I'm creating a mobile game on various mobile platforms and have decided to use PHP/MySQL as the back end and communicate with this via JSON. (The game will be text based).

I'm lacking on idea's on how to implement this, the sort of logic i'm after is as follows;

• User will need to register an account
• User will enter the game lobby looking for an open slo开发者_开发百科t
• If there is a suitable game ready and waiting (not full and waiting for new players) then join
• If not create a new game and await players

I was thinking of having 20 players for each game and only allowing the game to start when there's 3 or more players waiting. When there's 3 or more players waiting there would be a count down of say 60 seconds until the game began.

Now i know some of this might need to be done on the client side. I'm struggling on where to start!! So any idea's, code samples or links to reading material that may help would be very much appreciated. thanks!

Based on comments, I'm guessing you're looking for some ideas on database schema, like Brad Christie suggests. So I'm going to start with that.

First, you'll need a table for the players. I'm guessing you already have one of those, but you'll probably want to include a field for the game ID that they're in.

Next, you'll need a table for the games. This is where you store information on the game itself, including whether it's active. To get the player count, you simply query the list of players with that game's ID. You could also keep track of player count and update it whenever the player leaves or joins the game, depending on a few factors.

Now, the game lobby itself. The exact method here really depends on how you want it to function. You can either use AJAX to keep a list of currently active games up to date (and set up some sort of chat system to let players talk while waiting), or you can use the game lobby as routing page. If you go the latter route, then query the active games, automatically dump the player into one that meets your criteria, then send the user to the 'main game page'.

Hopefully this will give you a solid outline on how to start. I'm afraid I can't help you much more unless I know more about your requirements.

For register a user you simply need a form and save that form in your database. When the user logs in the you query the database matching the password and user name.