In an earlier post on web games, I mentioned an old multi-player web game that I used to play and which was discontinued in 2014.  I have a rough design for this and am busy learning Blazor as I believe that would be the best technology to use. It lets you run C# programs in the browser, no JavaScript needed. This simplifies input with verification and also updating the web page without having to do lots of messy Ajax stuff.

But being a web game there is a web server involved and the big question is what sort of data architecture to use? The most obvious one is probably using a relational database behind the scenes. That way each game (with up to 1,000 players) is held in a single database in about 12 tables. I’ll probably use MariaDB.

I did consider doing everything in RAM but its a terrible abuse of a web server and rather restricts it to running one or two games. Pulling stuff out of a database is much less strain on the system than having a few hundred MB of RAM tied up per game. A web server can support multiple games which helps keep the costs down.

Also with a web game, it raises the possibility of caching certain static files on disk to improve throughput.  This blog uses WordPress but has a cache so when you view a page, it’s almost certainly been pre-generated rather than built on the fly.

An example of a web game that I admire is Torn.com.