Alternatives
Products that do what Building an infinitely scalable multiplayer game does
I cofounded Hathora (https://hathora.dev/) last year and we've been working on making it easier for smaller teams and individual developers to build scalable multiplayer games. We think the serverless model is the simplest approach, allowing you to dynamically provision a new instance of your game server when users or your matchmaker requests a new session. We made this .io style demo to showcase this approach, and we're releasing the source code and documentation alongside with it.
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Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game development into a framework so developers can simply focus on implementing their…
2022 · docs.hathora.dev
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I've been working on an MMORPG that is now in alpha as a solo developer. Here are the major open source technologies that I use: Blender - 3D modeling software for creating the overall environment and every game object. I've gotten a lot of CC and Public Domain assets from https://poly.pizza GLTF - I export assets from blender to the GLTF asset format JSON - I write a JSON config for every game object that describes things like its name, its interactions, its collisions, etc. Node.js exporter - I iterate over the environment and every asset to create a scene hierarchy. I use…
2024 · alpha.reconquer.online
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I made a game (https://polyfight.io/) which revolves around a player (a tank) leveling up and upgrading by killing shapes and other tanks (partially inspired by https://diep.io). It has a bunch of features, a vast number of tanks, an inbuilt chatting system, clans to make teams with your friends, a colour scheme maker, controllable sandboxes which can be public or private, a last man standing gamemode, and an inbuilt 1v1 system with its own ELO rankings and a global leaderboard. The game has a few players right now, and I'd hope to spread the joy players have with…
2024 · polyfight.io
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Hello HN, I’ve always loved building frontend-only apps—those you can prototype over a weekend, host for free on GitHub Pages, and scale to millions of users. Unfortunately, AI-enabled apps complicate things, as exposing your OpenAI key to the world is obviously a no-go. This also means mobile developers often have to run their own servers. That’s why I built ServerlessAI, an API gateway that lets you securely call multiple AI providers directly from client side using OpenAI-compatible APIs. You can authenticate users through any identity provider, like Google or Apple, and set per-user…
2024 · serverlessai.dev
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Hey folks — here’s a small experiment I hacked together over the weekend: https://cleoselene.com/ In short, it’s a way to build multiplayer games with no client-side game logic. Everything is rendered on the server, and the game itself is written as simple Lua scripts. I built this to explore a few gamedev ideas I’ve been thinking about while working on Abstra: - Writing multiplayer games as if they were single-player (no client/server complexity) - Streaming game primitives instead of pixels, which should be much lighter - Server-side rendering makes cheating basically…
Jan 2026 · cleoselene.com
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2020 · github.com
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I've posted this game here before, hopefully a repost is fine as the game has changed quite a bit (improved AI, improved mapeditor, much quicker gameplay, etc). Game is based on JavaScript/Canvas and WebSockets. On the browser side the map is pre-rendered (as a background image), just the mobile units/buildings and animations are dynamically rendered. The lobby server is made in node.js, but the game server is C++ for performance reasons (mainly the pathfinding). I found the C++ WebSocket libraries out there to be too difficult to use so I made my own based on the rfc. Overall I…
2022 · battle-of-flags.com
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With all the turmoil in the game engine world recently, I thought I'd quickly post to show progress on our game platform dotbigbang.com. It's a fully integrated game platform where the multiplayer game editor and games all run on the web. You can make multiplayer games and share them with just a link with no setup at all. Breakdown of major features here: https://twitter.com/bobbydigitales/status/152647067103481856... We have comprehensive docs at http://docs.dotbigbang.com and a cosy Discord server at https://dotbigbang.com/discord All…
2023 · dotbigbang.com
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Greetings! My name is Jeff, and I’m “early-access” launching my SaaS “serverless” infrastructure for Jamstack, games (particularly board games), and traditional real-time scenarios (presence, pub/sub, etc…). This work is rooted in the frustration of building complicated board games using existing infrastructure. It just so happens that making board games easier has wide reaching implications. Landing page: https://www.adama-platform.com/ This is a radically different kind of “serverless” infrastructure where I want the benefits of both a serverless architecture with a…
2022
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Hey HN! Today we're launching ActorCore (https://actorcore.org/), a stateful serverless framework that enables deploying Cloudflare Durable Object-like workloads to any cloud. If you're unfamiliar with stateful serverless: it's like the actor model, where each actor maintains its own isolated, persistent state. (Think Lambda functions with local storage & runs indefinitely.) It enables easily building long-running, realtime, durable, or local-first backends with the flexibility of serverless infrastructure. The most widely used implementation is Cloudflare Durable Objects,…
2025 · github.com
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I'm building Kedge, a globally distributed platform for stateful serverless apps. Here's how you make a simple static site: `echo '# Hello world!' | ssh kedge.dev` I helped build Fly.io for 4 years and shared enthusiasm for the founders' vision of a 'global Heroku'. While there, I wrote "The Serverless Server" (https://fly.io/blog/the-serverless-server/) as a study of Lambda and a sketch of a modern serverless product built around lightweight VMs. That essay was the initial inspiration for Kedge. Kedge has a fast VM orchestrator that can create code sandboxes or…
Jul 2026 · kedge.dev
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2019 · github.com
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2018 · github.com
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Hi HN! We’re Yann, Edouard, and Bastien from Koyeb (https://www.koyeb.com/). We’re building a platform to let you deploy full-stack apps on high-performance hardware around the world, with zero configuration. We provide a “global serverless feeling”, without the hassle of re-writing all your apps or managing k8s complexity [1]. We built Scaleway, a cloud service provider where we designed ARM servers and provided them as cloud servers. During our time there, we saw customers struggle with the same issues while trying to deploy full-stack applications and APIs resiliently. As…
2023 · koyeb.com
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Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…
2023 · ambient.run
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Have a look at the website with an example map, https://www.serverlessmaps.com/, or read the accompanying blog post https://tobilg.com/serverless-maps-for-fun-and-profit
2024 · github.com
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