colyseus VS BabylonJS

If you don't want to dive deep into backend then https://colyseus.io/ might also be an option.

Since you already know Javascript you could try to use some existing server framework at first to avoid having to do everything from scratch. https://github.com/colyseus/colyseus

Try this Node.js based server framework https://github.com/colyseus/colyseus

https://colyseus.io/ (Authoritative server, that works with many engines JavaScript/Phaser/Unity/Haxe/Defold)

Also check Colyseus. Bit similar multiplayer server framework and built on top of Node.js/TypeScript. https://github.com/colyseus/colyseus

The above project uses a Node.js authoritative game state called Colyseus (https://github.com/colyseus/colyseus) which handles the state synchronisation between clients and server.

We use Colyseus for this. Pretty easy and open source too. https://colyseus.io/

https://colyseus.io/ (Authoritative server, that works with many engines JavaScript/Phaser/Unity/Haxe/Defold)

On a lower level, I have been using Colyseus (https://github.com/colyseus/colyseus) which is, in the words of the author: "[...] an Authoritative Multiplayer Framework for Node.js, with clients available for the Web, Unity3d, Defold, Haxe, and Cocos2d-X.". I have been using it on multiple projects as a state synchronisation library for my browser-based games. It takes cares of all the data synching aspecta among all players in a "room". The community is very active and you will get a lot of help to begin with and scale your creations.

Of course, a lot will have to be done by you for anything like client-side prediction, server reconciliation, lag compensation, entity interpolation, but knowing that the state manages itself is already a huge relief if you are unfamiliar with these concepts.

Another project which already includes many of these features is https://github.com/timetocode/nengi. It is more opinionated and well focused on fast-paced games.

On my side, I have been creating an open-source multiplayer game for the browser that includes client-side prediction, entity interpolation and server reconciliation https://github.com/halftheopposite/tosios.

It's been around for a while, and we've featured it in the April 2019 and March 2022 Release Radars. It's also been in GitHub Game Bytes and on our latest episode of The Download. Yes, I'm talking about Babylon, the powerful web rendering engine for all kinds of graphics. The newest update includes support for basic Global Illumination, a highly requested feature. Read more about other cool new additions including Gaussian Splatting, Ragdoll physics, Procedural Geometry and all the breaking changes in the Babylon release notes.

Wow that site is super cool! So I see most of the 3D stuff is using canvas, maybe three.js or babylon.js or possibly pixi.js.

Sure; I've used [Phaser](https://phaser.io/) before for a game jam like project and I've heard of [PixiJS](https://pixijs.com/) and [Babylon.js](https://www.babylonjs.com/) as options too. I can't really give a good recommendation either way; Phaser was fun to just write TypeScript and see my game, but it felt like a toy compared to Unreal. I'm sure you could really push it to its limits though. You mentioned you know about LibGDX; I don't have experience with it, but it does seem like a viable option.

BabylonJS: https://www.babylonjs.com/

Now we are finally set! (or so we thought). Dylan was already working on the client, learning about Babylon.js and Lucas was already working on authentication and reading about Colyseus. I wanted to start a conversation about how the client - server communication should be because I already had some ideas about how to solve common problems such as protocols, backend solutions for messaging, scalability and availability; those were my first concerns. I have always been a backend guy and I must say that I suck at front end, and although I can do React and Angular, don’t ask me to do something fancy 😅.