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Nearly a year ago I deployed a multiplayer feature for Farmhand, an open source and web-based farming game that I created. Since that initial deployment, the multiplayer system has experienced no downtime or service degradation. And best of all, I've paid nothing to host the service and therefore I am able to allow others to play for free. This article is an overview of how I designed this system from the ground up.
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trystero
🤝 Build instant multiplayer webapps, no server required — Magic WebRTC matchmaking over BitTorrent, Nostr, MQTT, IPFS, and Firebase
Farmhand is implemented as a PWA that runs in a web browser. The client's overall architecture is outside the scope of this article, but for the purposes of online multiplayer it uses Trystero with the WebTorrent matchmaking strategy to connect peers to each other. It interacts with the central market server via a REST API.
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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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activePlayers is a map of unique player IDs (determined by clients via uuid to timestamps of when they last made a GET https://farmhand.vercel.app/api/get-market-data?room=global request. Each time the function is invoked, it examines the map to see which timestamps are older than the HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL_PERIOD (currently 10 seconds) and deletes any that are expired. This data is returned to the client and also written back to Redis to be persisted across function invocations. This is how the active room participants are tracked.
