quilkin

An example of what seems to be a reasonable usecase for UDP proxy is Quilkin[1] from Google. Made for hosting game servers on Kubernetes, and supports session auth, routing, monitoring, and various other features, some of them using prefix bits in UDP packages. Also used for DOS protection without the traffic hitting the server. Not sure how usable it is but Google actually has a lot of open-source stuff for game hosting on kubernetes with agones + openmatch + quilkin, I am somewhat tempted to play with them at some point. [1] https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin

It's called Quilkin: https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin

It sounds very much like your stated goals ("...battle the network and latency, find ways to prevent cheating, and figure out how to make a scalable backend architecture") are very much in alignment with Agones (https://agones.dev) and it's sub-projects Quilkin (https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin), Open-Match (https://open-match.dev/site/), and Open-Saves (https://github.com/googleforgames/open-saves). Had you explored these at all?

The firewall would need to be able to handle all the DDoS traffic as well, since your current idea would still pass the game server's IP back to a client. This is doable if you're hosting on a cloud provider and let their firewalls filter the traffic before hitting the game server. Embark Studios recently open sourced (in alpha) a UDP proxy[1] designed for games that lets you implement a load balancing layer. This allows you to remove servers in the load balancing layer in the event that it comes under attack, allowing the game server to stay up and only having to disconnect a portion of players connected to the attacked loadbalancer. Having a proxy layer is also how Steam protects game servers using the Steam Datagram Relay[2]. [1]: https://github.com/googleforgames/quilkin [2]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/multiplayer/ste