Spent half a dozen years working in AAA realm for multiplayer games and an equal amount of time working on my own indie projects, and as you can see already in this thread, there's really two (often confused) pieces to this conversation. First, there's Multiplayer Gameplay Engineering. This is typically a single process handling the 2~64 people shooting each other in a single game. Second, there's Online Services Engineering for Games. This is typically orchestrating the above process, hundreds or thousands of times, as well as things like Matchmaking systems, party systems, Storefronts, etc.
Below are two articles which I think can be really valuable "Baby's first" for the topics of Multiplayer Gameplay Engineering and Online Services for Games. I wrote them beginning from my perspective of approaching these problems my first time as a college student many years ago, and continued with how my approach evolved through experience. I also include lots of links to seminal articles/talks on the topics that I read as I attempted to "do my homework" while making my own indie game.
Below are two articles which I think can be really valuable "Baby's first" for the topics of Multiplayer Gameplay Engineering and Online Services for Games. I wrote them beginning from my perspective of approaching these problems my first time as a college student many years ago, and continued with how my approach evolved through experience. I also include lots of links to seminal articles/talks on the topics that I read as I attempted to "do my homework" while making my own indie game.
Multiplayer Gameplay Engineering https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DruErridge/20181004/327885/B...
Online Services for Games https://www.gamebreakingstudios.com/posts/dedicated-game-ser...