Show HN: Real-time multiplayer games with cubes. Early feedback on dev docs?

It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it.

Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront.

But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice.

These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard.

Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is.

But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game.

Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it.

But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun.

In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight.

Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.

Devs out there: if you make something like firebase that lets you realtime sync in-memory server data (instead of db data like firebase) among clients in a cost-efficient way such that it's viable for multiplayer browser games and mobile apps, there are a lot of people who would pay for it. Me most of all. I would pay $100+/mo on a starter plan for it, even before I scaled.

You really have to have serious technical chops to do this well right now, and it's a big barrier to entry.

The 19yo who wrote Agar.io single-handedly is nothing short of a savant.

A few suggestions that may or may not be helpful:

- I realize that this is a big part of your esthetic, but blocky "game fonts" are hard to read. They're fine for games, but for editing code I want a normal monospace font rendered at a normal DPI.

- I feel like there should be a way to apply code changes without a full Publish. It's nice to test a change without resetting the entire world.

- Your docs are off to a good start, but it's really not clear to me how everything comes together. A more in depth example would be more helpful at this point than API docs, I think.

I'll definitely keep an eye on this. Nice work!