NInightowl_games·May 15, 2024
Hey HN.
We have a pretty cool tech stack to make a game like this possible, so I thought I'd give a writeup of how we did it.
We ship Goober Dash to multiple websites, iOS, Android, Mac App Store & Steam PC/Mac/Linux. We run timed deals on premium cosmetics and have advertising on the web versions.
We have a kubernetes cluster that has Agones [1] for game server orchestration, a custom written matchmaker, a fork of nakama [2] for the account system, our gameserver fleets (Godot in a docker container), some monitoring tools, a postgres database, and a bunch of ingress controller stuff. We run all of this out of Digital Ocean's nyc datacenter. Fun fact: my personal ping to nyc suddenly got much faster a few months ago (80ms -> 50ms).
We made this game in Godot 3 using a custom c++ netcode module for rollback and resimulation. This multiplay
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er system supports websocket, webRTC and enet as a transport layer. The clients use a second thread to simulate from the server state to their current state. This second thread is usable even on the web when SharedArrayBuffer is available.
We made a level editor for this game where users can create levels. There are over 50,000 levels. Most of them are kinda throw away levels of users simply trying out the level editor, but there are some really cool levels too, like this 'flappy bird' level [3] or this one that uses crates in a cool way [4].
For this game, we wrote the majority of it in GDScript as a first prototype, but then before release we had to rewrite the gameplay loop in c++ to make it performant enough (we can hit 60fps on android web on many devices now).
We are a small company of 3 people up in Canada and we've been working our butts off for 3 years to make it work as an indie gaming studio. We're climbing and grinding, but still not crushing it. Personally, I think Goober Dash is a great game and deserves more attention. Would love to know what you think of it, and I can answer any questions about Godot as I have been using it professionally for years now.
[1] https://github.com/googleforgames/agones
[2] https://github.com/heroiclabs/nakama
[3] https://gooberdash.winterpixel.io/?play=f3ccaa3e-5c9c-41f8-8...
[4] https://gooberdash.winterpixel.io/?play=7eb9fe45-6f7d-4c8a-a...