In order to reduce the number of packets that I needed to send each packet was split into sections of data that contained a header field and a data field. The header contained a byte to signify the packet type and an unsigned integer to describe the size of the section.

Over the course of the few weeks after I made this I built upon it by adding prediction and smoothing of the player and projectile positions so that the movement of players appeared smooth and accurate to every player when there was a large amount of latency between them and the server.