Alex So

I'm Alex, a solo indie dev building a portfolio of web games - with Poki as my main publisher - and betting on one niche: online multiplayer in the browser. Make Brainrots Online was experiment #1. The tech stack, the CCU targets, perf optimizations - all of it is groundwork for what's next. Follow if you care about: - web gamedev (ThreeJS, PixiJS, BabylonJS, Bun, WebSockets) - publishing on Poki (self publishing as well) - solo dev building a real business

@isaac_mason_ NaN is there!

links! isaac-mason.github.io/packcat/ github.com/isaac-mason/pa…

I don't know how to make a tool without making a website for it... New packcat website! Making multiplayer web games? Stop using JSON.stringify + JSON.parse! Use packcat!

@AzFlin Yeah, sword masters is the only top game I know

@afrokick didn't even know they had mmorpgs on poki

First test of my #mmorpg using poki playtests: 3min(26% engagement). Still a lot of work, but Im happy that the basic gameplay is interesting for players.

@WeVennStudios Just basic auto combat. Still many tasks on my todo list like equipment, talents etc

@afrokick 3 min playtests at 26% engagement is encouraging... which core loop kept them in?

@EmberQuestIO It depends)) if your game looks like roblox game it might work on Poki. Same with crazygames. If you want more mature audience that s Yandex games or self publishing

@afrokick MMORPGs are a tough sell on poki, because of the younger audience. You'll need ~5+ min avg. session duration and even then passing QA is not a guarantee. We never submitted EmberQuest to Poki for this reason. MMOs work better with older audiences. 😄

Almost done with character equipment feature.

"the boiler room" - splat created with world labs marble - rendering with three.js + spark - pathfinding and navmesh generation with navcat - physics with crashcat - splat 'lighting' with spark modifiers open source! fork it and make something silly! process below 🧵 #threejs

Prompt engineering is more and more important. And having years of real experience just makes it much easier/safer.

Typescript 7 before @jarredsumner blog post about @bunjavascript rust rewrite... Magic!

If you want actually fast feedback for your agents (or CI), I'd recommend: bun test && oxlint && bunx @typescript/native-preview - ESLint is slow - tsc is slow (but still useful for IDE) I'm using `bun done` as a shortcut.

@CritterObserves This game is room-based, so I can easily scale it vertically/horizontally. Probably ~100 is a ceiling

@afrokick How many players do you plan to support? The scale side is what always scares me off of MMOs.

Day 4: Building web MMORPG - new UI + ui particles - WIP new monsters - improved custom editor to support items/spots editing

just upgraded to Ultra and 2 hours later 32% API used ... Just gamedev

@jarredsumner I didn't wait for the last season of Game of Thrones as eagerly as I'm waiting for this blog post...

the blog post

@SketchpunkLabs b(7 + 1)/b = 8

whoa... I dont know how but I solved this in like a few seconds. My first thought was the top is 8x the bottom, so something like 2 * 8 = 16... Wait...7*2 + 2 = 16... whoa. #maths

@MartinTale Congrats man! I just crossed 500. 2000 seems unbelievable for me rn))

2,000 followers! 🥳🎉 So busy building I nearly missed it 😅 10k by year end? Dream big, right? 🙃 Thank you all! 🥰

Wow! After 13 years I finally got 500 followers! Thank you guys! As @marclou says “don’t you dare give up”. Building in public is something that I found really interesting and useful for me because: - it motivates me been consistent - keep learning English(2years ago I had a2 and now b1/2) - sharing indie gamedev as business journey is still something unique as I see - new friends!!! Let’s goooo!

@Shayo5a_53 I’ll, thank you 🙏

@afrokick keep building

Day 3: Building web MMORPG - pivoted combat system to melee. - first level design iteration. Gonna compare small vs large map. - ran first poki playtest. Found out a couple of tech issues. Got few 5min+ sessions #indiedev #gamedev #webgamedev