boardgame.io VS builder

If you're looking for something more low-level, I can recommend boardgame.io [1].

[1] https://boardgame.io/

Here's mine! https://skeoh.com/othello/

It's not nearly as polished but I had a lot of fun making it. It uses React and the now-no-longer-maintained https://boardgame.io/.

It could definitely be used to do that. However, there are better frameworks to accomplish this with many of the features needed for board games. https://boardgame.io is one of them. If anything, take a look at that and utilize some of their game logic and game state management ideas in Django.

Are you looking for: https://github.com/boardgameio/boardgame.io

Check out boardgame.io if you are not looking to do everything from scratch.

Also https://www.freeboardgames.org/ which hosts games built with the https://boardgame.io/ game engine.

I think you know best what you want to build yourself. :-)

If you separate the abstract interface for sending/receiving game states and its implementation, you can rely on an external service like hushfile to get started, and then switch to running a similar service yourself afterwards. Saves you from having to deploy and maintain the server initially.

Running a VPS wouldn't cost more than $5/mo.

Since nobody mentioned it, you may want to consider:

https://boardgame.io/

It is a service specifically for managing JSON game state.

But it comes with its own ideas, so your mileage may vary.

Have you looked at https://boardgame.io ? You’ll still have to deploy a backend but all the multiplayer functionality is already built in.

If you are more interested in the rules/logic side of things there’s also https://boardgame.io/

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