Show HN: Hathora – Multiplayer Game Development Made Easy

• builder

  23 540 7.1 Handlebars

  Multiplayer game framework (by hathora)

  

Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game development into a framework so developers can simply focus on implementing their game logic.

Some technical pieces of Hathora I wanted to highlight:

- Hathora includes a system I think of as “gRPC for games”. You define your API in Hathora’s declarative format and the framework spits out typesafe data models, clients, and server endpoint stubs across multiple programming languages (although currently only Typescript is implemented). Minimal packet sizes are achieved through a binary serialization format which includes a delta encoding feature, allowing the framework to efficiently synchronize state by sending data diffs.

- Hathora includes a Swagger-like Prototype UI generated from the API definition. This allows you to view the game state and call server methods all in realtime, letting you interact with your backend logic without writing a single line of frontend code. Once you are happy with the backend logic, you can create a fully custom frontend using any framework/technology you’d like and just use the Hathora client to communicate with the backend.

- By handling generic game functionality (state synchronization, messaging, persistence, etc) for you, Hathora lets you create multiplayer games with very few lines of code. For example, see chess which is implemented in under 200 lines of user code: https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/che.... I also made (a massively simplified version of) Among Us in under 200 lines of code: https://github.com/hathora/among-us-tutorial

I am looking for developers interested in making online multiplayer games to try out Hathora and give me feedback. Additionally, if the roadmap seems interesting to you I would gladly welcome contributions: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/roadmap. I’ll be around to answer questions, let me know what you think!

• among-us-tutorial

  2 9 3.3 TypeScript
  

Hi HN, this is Harsh, I am the developer behind Hathora. I tried making a simple multiplayer game a few years ago and, as someone with software engineering experience but no gamedev experience, I found it to be very challenging. On top of the challenges of building a single player game, you now have to constantly battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture. With Hathora my goal was to encode best practices for online multiplayer game development into a framework so developers can simply focus on implementing their game logic.

Some technical pieces of Hathora I wanted to highlight:

- Hathora includes a system I think of as “gRPC for games”. You define your API in Hathora’s declarative format and the framework spits out typesafe data models, clients, and server endpoint stubs across multiple programming languages (although currently only Typescript is implemented). Minimal packet sizes are achieved through a binary serialization format which includes a delta encoding feature, allowing the framework to efficiently synchronize state by sending data diffs.

- Hathora includes a Swagger-like Prototype UI generated from the API definition. This allows you to view the game state and call server methods all in realtime, letting you interact with your backend logic without writing a single line of frontend code. Once you are happy with the backend logic, you can create a fully custom frontend using any framework/technology you’d like and just use the Hathora client to communicate with the backend.

- By handling generic game functionality (state synchronization, messaging, persistence, etc) for you, Hathora lets you create multiplayer games with very few lines of code. For example, see chess which is implemented in under 200 lines of user code: https://github.com/hathora/hathora/tree/develop/examples/che.... I also made (a massively simplified version of) Among Us in under 200 lines of code: https://github.com/hathora/among-us-tutorial

I am looking for developers interested in making online multiplayer games to try out Hathora and give me feedback. Additionally, if the roadmap seems interesting to you I would gladly welcome contributions: https://docs.hathora.dev/#/roadmap. I’ll be around to answer questions, let me know what you think!

• SurveyJS

  surveyjs.io sponsored

  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.

  

• matchbox

  8 808 8.8 Rust

  Painless peer-to-peer WebRTC networking for rust wasm (and native!) (by johanhelsing)

https://github.com/johanhelsing/matchbox

Even then, you'd cover only some very specific use-cases of multiplayer game-making.

• geckos.io

  5 1,289 7.0 TypeScript

  🦎 Real-time client/server communication over UDP using WebRTC and Node.js http://geckos.io

  

I agree the scope is massive. I think a lot of people struggle with figuring out how to even get started with multiplayer dev, and I hope Hathora can be a useful tool for them.

Thanks for linking matchbox - I've been looking into https://github.com/geckosio/geckos.io as a way to integrate WebRTC into Hathora

• nakama

  40 8,278 9.0 Go

  Distributed server for social and realtime games and apps.

  

Looks interesting. We've evaluating multiplayer server frameworks at the moment and have decided on Nakama (https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama). Any thoughts on how Hathora compares? Particularly interested in the realtime multiplayer component, specifically around performance and scalability.

• quilkin

  7 1,213 8.9 Rust

  Quilkin is a non-transparent UDP proxy specifically designed for use with large scale multiplayer dedicated game server deployments, to ensure security, access control, telemetry data, metrics and more.

  

• open-saves

  1 202 5.0 Go

  Open Saves is a cloud native data store for game development.

  

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• gridia

  3 9 0.0 TypeScript

When making the netcode for my web game, I highly valued TypeScript support so to get it by default, I defined the message types in TypeScript so they could be used directly[1]. I see that this framework defines its messages in .yml and converts it to types (stored in a folder kept out of source control).

I'm not sure which way is best, but it is very nice to have the feature support of `.d.ts` files when creating complex message types, as opposed to needing to learn a new thing. Clearly if this is going to be a cross-platform (not just web) framework then using TypeScript as the source-of-truth makes far less sense.

Anyway, very impressed with the binary format/delta encoding feature! That's been something that I know I _should_ do but am putting off until I see signs of sending raw JSON being problematic.

[1] https://github.com/connorjclark/gridia/blob/master/src/proto...

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