among-us-tutorial VS builder

Among Us Demo (180 LOC)

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 game logic.

Some technical pieces of Hathora I wanted to highlight:

- Hathora includes a system I think of as “gRPC for games”. You define your API in Hathora’s declarative format and the framework spits out typesafe data models, clients, and server endpoint stubs across multiple programming languages (although currently only Typescript is implemented). Minimal packet sizes are achieved through a binary serialization format which includes a delta encoding feature, allowing the framework to efficiently synchronize state by sending data diffs.

- Hathora includes a Swagger-like Prototype UI generated from the API definition. This allows you to view the game state and call server methods all in realtime, letting you interact with your backend logic without writing a single line of frontend code. Once you are happy with the backend logic, you can create a fully custom frontend using any framework/technology you’d like and just use the Hathora client to communicate with the backend.

- By handling generic game functionality (state synchronization, messaging, persistence, etc) for you, Hathora lets you create multiplayer games with very few lines of code. For example, see chess which is implemented in under 200 lines of user code: https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/che.... I also made (a massively simplified version of) Among Us in under 200 lines of code: https://github.com/hathora/among-us-tutorial

I am looking for developers interested in making online multiplayer games to try out Hathora and give me feedback. Additionally, if the roadmap seems interesting to you I would gladly welcome contributions: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/roadmap. I’ll be around to answer questions, let me know what you think!

We have a partnership with Hathora (https://hathora.dev/) so that our infrastructure can scale globally with high performance so we can provide the best user experience possible despite the realities of playing games over the internet. We also have some big plans around using rollback that we've covered elsewhere that we're cautiously optimistic about.

For multiplayer/server-less games, try Hathora

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.

Hey I'm the creator of https://hathora.dev/ which aims to provide a super simple deployment and scaling experience for session-based games. It's based on containers and can deploy any kind of game server. Check it out and see if it meets your needs!

At Hathora, our mission is to make it easier for developers to build, launch, and scale multiplayer games. One of the core technologies we have built is the Hathora Coordinator, which is our fully managed multi-tenant implementation of a Stateful Router.

Hi there! I started a company this year focused on multiplayer server infrastructure. We also built a multiplayer game framework for Typescript that has gotten 400+ stars on Github in the past few months: https://github.com/hathora/hathora

Would love to connect and exchange notes about multiplayer development -- if you're interested, my email is on my profile.

I've been working on my own realtime networking engine[0] and I think there are a few important points related to network syncing that are not mentioned in this article:

1) Bandwidth. The users internet can only handle so much network throughput, so for fast paced games (where you're sending data to each client at a rate of 20+ frames per second) it becomes important to optimize your per-frame packet size. This means using techniques like binary encoding and delta compression (only send diffs).

2) Server infrastructure. For client-server games, latency is going to be a function of server placement. If you only have a single server that is deployed in us-east and a bunch of users want to play with each other in Australia, their experience is going to suffer massively. Ideally you want a global network of servers and try to route users to their closest server.

3) TCP vs UDP. Packet loss is a very real problem, and you don't want clients to be stuck waiting for old packets to be resent to them when they already have the latest data. UDP makes a major difference in gameplay when dealing with lossy networks.

[0] https://github.com/hathora/hathora

I built a bunch of multiplayer games in the past and am now working on a framework to try and make it easier for others to do so: https://github.com/hathora/hathora