In my own projects I've found the feedback loop to be much slower in native mobile apps compared to web. For web apps my workflow has involved lots of human verification just through using the app myself and testing out the latest features/fixes. Sometimes I get the agent itself to do this before I do using Codex's chrome extension. This same process on mobile is a lot slower. How have you approached this aspect? Have you figured out a way to get the agent to control an emulator?
Nope. I guess I should try that at some point. I’d be looking into interacting with the Mac build for the performance reasons mentioned in the post, that iOS sims are slowww
was expecting a bit more substance but always interesting to read different approaches.
but I do wonder if BEAM is a bit of an overkill, even fly.io (known among developer threads to be very unreliable uptime) wouldn't be my first pick.
Cloudflare Durable Objects really is generous, not often can you get replicated database and realtime sync for such low barrier in cost and implementation.
I do wonder tho what Cloudflare's ultimate game is, as I'd imagine once they corner the market and practically everything is running off it, wouldn't be hard to say raise the $5/month to something higher.
Yeah I could've been more technical. Maybe in another post. On the fly issue, I love an underdog story. I know people have complained a lot about their uptime. I suspect they are grinding very hard on that. I've not really had any issues. They also seem to be a popular elixir host so I thought why not. Deploying is heroku style, "fly deploy".
Really interested in hearing more about the architecture. Especially (1) why you chose Elixir, Phoenix over TS (2) how you dealt with real-time multiplayer.
Aside: The links to the web game in the post don't lead to being able to play.
not op either but I built my entire startup using elixir. We have a realtime sync component across a range of devices that sync data between them.
It (phoenix channels) worked out of the box. in the last 6 years of development and growth, not once have we ever had to even discuss scaling issues related to it.
It just works and when you're in a startup, the more you can focus on growing your product instead of scaling issues, the more you're winning.
Hi! I'm sorry I took down the web client shortly after I write this in order to narrow my focus on the client codebase. I realize I ruined my point about being able to compare the client performance. I'm editing the post shortly.
I've been curious about elixir for years. Since maybe 2016. I tried in the days before AI, but I couldn't really get over the hump of syntax and BEAM and all of that.
I'd read it was the kind of thing that would be good for games, but I didn't really understand why until AI helped me build this.
A room is a GenServer. Which means its a process. Which means the unit of gameplay matches the unit of compute, kinda. That's really great. You can't really do that with node. Well, I guess with Durable Objects / PartyKit you have a closer match there.
There is a matchmaker process that runs. It assigns your socket to a room. But yeah, after that, your socket is exchanging messages with that room.
Because arrow physics are simple, the client predicts how it thinks the server will say things will be, and reconciles if / when wrong when it hears from the server about the room state.
> Also, I would encourage others to target Mac in addition to iOS for a reason you might not expect: build times. The simulators and Xcode are really pretty slow. It’s all a lot faster if you’re targeting Mac.
Yes, this makes my day: (also) target macOS for continuous rapid loops on one project, or target iOS and end up flitting back and forth between many projects. ("mac (made for iPad)" does not work.)
Yeah, I do the same thing with Flutter when I'm in "rapid iteration mode" and build for desktop Linux in my case, though wireless debugging on Android is almost fast enough it's more that I don't want to dart back and forth between my laptop and phone.
A question for OP: why did you choose Crunchy Data for your database, instead of Fly's own managed postgres offering? Because the latency between Fly and Crunchy Data must be quite high, given that they are probably not in the same datacenter.
I'm sorry I took down the web client shortly after writing this post. Really ruins the point I made of being able to contrast web vs native performance, doesnt it? I realized I wanted to narrow my focus on client codebases. Fixing the post shortly.
I've been really enjoying retro games in the form of '80s arcade games lately. Last weekend I had Claude build me a web-based Rally-X inspired game and the experience was pretty good. I like that I can just drop it into a github.io and be done with it, but that isn't going to work for a game that needs a backend. https://linsomniac.github.io/rally-xy/
I'm now working on a "nsnipes" game, and that, because of the multi-player aspect, is going to need a backend server.
Thanks for the write up. Wondering why not use something like Flutter for good cross platform support with good graphical performance on all systems.
One could argue that with agentic programming, releasing on a new platform is simply a matter of prompting for a new target, but I fear that the non-determinism of LLMs will lead into a whac-a-mole situation where you’re constantly fighting framework specifics and the code that the agent spit out to get to pixel perfect solutions across the platforms. Flutter in this case would be a more token efficient solution and quite fast on most platforms (particular the ones where their Impeller engine runs).
Yet, there is hardly any Web game that it is at the level of Infinity Blade, the game used to show off OpenGL ES 2.0 support back in 2010.
Browsers 3D support is a black box for game developers, still no debugging tools other than having a native build that you can plug RenderDoc, not a priority for browser vendors for the past decade.
Then there is the whole issue how assets get loaded, space on browser for caching them, and security (F12 away to mess with the game engine).
22 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 52.9 ms ] threadbut I do wonder if BEAM is a bit of an overkill, even fly.io (known among developer threads to be very unreliable uptime) wouldn't be my first pick.
Cloudflare Durable Objects really is generous, not often can you get replicated database and realtime sync for such low barrier in cost and implementation.
I do wonder tho what Cloudflare's ultimate game is, as I'd imagine once they corner the market and practically everything is running off it, wouldn't be hard to say raise the $5/month to something higher.
Aside: The links to the web game in the post don't lead to being able to play.
It (phoenix channels) worked out of the box. in the last 6 years of development and growth, not once have we ever had to even discuss scaling issues related to it.
It just works and when you're in a startup, the more you can focus on growing your product instead of scaling issues, the more you're winning.
I've been curious about elixir for years. Since maybe 2016. I tried in the days before AI, but I couldn't really get over the hump of syntax and BEAM and all of that.
I'd read it was the kind of thing that would be good for games, but I didn't really understand why until AI helped me build this.
A room is a GenServer. Which means its a process. Which means the unit of gameplay matches the unit of compute, kinda. That's really great. You can't really do that with node. Well, I guess with Durable Objects / PartyKit you have a closer match there.
There is a matchmaker process that runs. It assigns your socket to a room. But yeah, after that, your socket is exchanging messages with that room.
Because arrow physics are simple, the client predicts how it thinks the server will say things will be, and reconciles if / when wrong when it hears from the server about the room state.
Yes, this makes my day: (also) target macOS for continuous rapid loops on one project, or target iOS and end up flitting back and forth between many projects. ("mac (made for iPad)" does not work.)
I'm now working on a "nsnipes" game, and that, because of the multi-player aspect, is going to need a backend server.
One could argue that with agentic programming, releasing on a new platform is simply a matter of prompting for a new target, but I fear that the non-determinism of LLMs will lead into a whac-a-mole situation where you’re constantly fighting framework specifics and the code that the agent spit out to get to pixel perfect solutions across the platforms. Flutter in this case would be a more token efficient solution and quite fast on most platforms (particular the ones where their Impeller engine runs).
likely - it would grow organically too since all one has to do is share a link.
for social games yeah - Elixir | BEAM is an excellent stack.
Browsers 3D support is a black box for game developers, still no debugging tools other than having a native build that you can plug RenderDoc, not a priority for browser vendors for the past decade.
Then there is the whole issue how assets get loaded, space on browser for caching them, and security (F12 away to mess with the game engine).