Building a multiplayer game server and keeping (most of) your hair

Whether it’s a first person shooter, real time strategy, action or physics based – making a game is the hardest software challenge you will ever undertake. That is – until you’ve decided to make it multiplayer.

So how do you create a server that runs a game, communicates with clients and compensates for lag? How do you make all your players feel like they’re playing the same game, at the same time, with each other (even though they actually don’t)?

I will present the major challenges for enabling low-latency games on the web based on my experience developing Lance.gg, a Node.js game server. I’ll also talk about how to write efficient net code, optimize the data that goes over the wire and demystify scary terms like “client side prediction” and “entity interpolation/extrapolation”.

By the end of the talk you’ll have a working multiplayer game that we can all play together!