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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
📯 Serverless WebRTC matchmaking for painless P2P — Make any site multiplayer in a few lines — Use BitTorrent, IPFS, or 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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Appwrite
Appwrite - The Open Source Firebase alternative introduces iOS support . Appwrite is an open source backend server that helps you build native iOS applications much faster with realtime APIs for authentication, databases, files storage, cloud functions and much more!
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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.
