What is a REST arch?
Mine is based on the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG.
I’m debating on whether I should focus on LAN Play first or should I skip LAN Play altogether and go straight for Online Play.
REST Wikipedia . Google about REST a simple simple layer of communications based on HTTP but can be adopted to server ↔ client communication protocol instead of custom made packet layer.
My advice is to focus on what you really want the game to be. LAN is pretty useless if you can develop a full online game with more than 2 players from all around the world. It’s really rewarding. I made a prototype years ago and shared to my good friend @Derk Jochems and we enjoyed it a lot. I remember we could see our players moving and attacking a creature live… priceless 
TGC game mechanics are not that difficult is you have good OOP background ( Xojo is pure OOP, that’s awesome! ). Before writing any single line of code, get some CR cards, get your classes, your interfaces, all written before writing a single line of code. Then make milestones, Scrum is nice even for a solo developer, and keep your project alive.
CR Cards? Scrum?
EDIT: I tried to Google CR Cards but got nowhere as all I got were stuff about business cards, Christmas cards.
My biggest question is how do I get my program to interface with my website to allow users to verse each other?
@Charles Fasano . I’m kind of an OOP purist, although is not 100% needed to achieve a successful project with OOP / Agile methodologies in any OOP language. If your are among the ones who is beginning with Xojo and OOP / Agile, I suggest to follow the paradigms and Xojo will not only be your best choice in almost cases, but a fantastic learning tool. I don’t know about your programming skills, and in my experience, asking this could be somewhat intimidating ( English is not native language…).
Yes, I meant Business cards. There is an old OOP way of designing OOP software, and that includes having a buch of these cards to write with pen and pencil sentences that you then can identify as Objects and their relationships.
There is a wonderful OOP Intro video by Simond Allardice ( http://www.lynda.com/Programming-tutorials/Foundations-of-Programming-Object-Oriented-Design/96949-2.html ) that I find one of the best you can get to begin with OOP. I’m not an OOP expert, just think Xojo is 100% OOP and it’s designed to write OOP software. Xojo is really an awesome language!
If you can understand OOP paradigms, you will then enjoy Xojo much better than the ones that have been somewhat lazy to change a programming methodology (mostly VB users moving to Xojo ).
All your answers are really OOP candidates and I can give you some hints about your project. I surely will kindly help you with some classes, but you should google and try to think yourself, and then… sure… Xojo has an awesome community of people. Among best I know!
I’ll be glad to contribute with Xojo questions… The kind of project you achieve needs an strong knowledge of Xojo, OOP, Meths, etc…
Hope my answer doesn’t seem rude. It’s not my intention!
My biggest concern is how to set up some kind of server to handle the data exchange between users and to allow users to connect to one another. I don’t know anything about web servers or web programming so I have no clue what to do or where to begin. Once I get that part done the rest should be much easier.
I’m mostly doing this to learn and have some fun. I don’t expect to have a large user base, but you never know.
My first programming language I learned was BASIC. Then I moved to Visual Basic. Then to RealBasic due to the cross platform part. I am a Mac user so Visual Basic was a not an option.
While a pure OOP approach would be the ideal solution, it sounds like it’s a bit beyond where you are in terms of experience. It is something to aspire to, but isn’t really needed for this application. UDP is tricky to get right, for sure, but EasyUDP/AutoDiscovery take care of a lot of the details. The main problem you have is not being able to communicate from your main machine to the virtual machine. I would suggest you abandon the virtual machine for now and get something working, either with two real machines or two instances of an app on one machine.
I have decided to do the Online feature and give up on LAN Play but I have no idea where to begin. I guess I would need to set up some kind of web server to handle logging on and showing available players but I have no idea what I need or how to do it.
This is a turn-based TCG game where each player takes a turn with the possibility of the opposing player countering the turn player’s actions. I don’t think I would need anything too complex as this is not a first person shooting where time is of the essence.
Does anyone know where I should begin and maybe have some sample code for me to look at as I learn best from example?