builder VS love

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

I've built a few games with my son over the years. The fun part for us was all about fast iteration, and then laughing at the bugs together.

There are some other recommendations here for how to approach 3d, and he is specifically asking for 3d -- but I want to put in one more pitch for 2d: the fun-to-tedium ratio can be much higher.

I wonder if you could spend some time prototyping some of his ideas in LÖVE https://love2d.org/ -- if you show him the smallest sketch of something working, he might have an idea about what to add next.

Many years ago, on a flight, we went from 0 to game before we landed (with no experience).

* When a cell is born it randomly takes on the color of one of its (3) parents.

To try it out:

1. Install LÖVE for your device from https://love2d.org (~5MB and open source). (iOS requires building from source on a Mac, or installing the third-party Love2D Studio: https://love2d-studio.marknoteapp.com)

2. Install my Lua Carousel from https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel (~100KB). It includes all its source code and can be edited live on a computer as it runs.

3. Copy the ~100 lines of code from the bottom of https://akkartik.itch.io/carousel/devlog/651711/new-version-after-9-days and paste them into Lua Carousel.

Probably the most important piece of software we'll be playing around with is a game engine called LÖVE. Lua is well known around developer circles as being a good scripting language when it comes to making games, and this engine is one of the more popular. I'll be going through installation at the end of this post.

I got it – these are the steps I took:

1. Download Love from https://love2d.org/

libGDX is great, but I can understand if it's not for some people. This also applies to love2d, raylib and Monogame

You don't need to use git if you don't want to. Try downloading the 0.10.2 source directly here (the file you want is love-0.10.2-linux-src.tar.gz); I see you've tried this already but try again just to see what happens. Extract it to a directory (e.g. love-0.10.2-linux-src) and then run:

Love2d (MIT/C++/Lua) https://github.com/love2d/love

- Löve (doesn't have a separate page, but showcases a few games at the bottom of the page): https://love2d.org

The game, Wasp Escape, was built using the open-source Löve 2D game library for Lua.

love2d (lua) is a productive, fun, good docs, and most importantly proven / field-tested 2d game library, with easy to learn fast to compile and fast to run language - lua. while lua might not have a lot of features as python, the big bonus is that its much more focused language, which is important because otherwise you can get easily distracted on bells and whistles that other programming languages provide, i know that from experience