Building a Multiplayer Game Engine With Deno and TypeScript
While the barrier of entry for game creation has gotten much lower, multiplayer solutions are extremely fragmented and web export support remains limited*. Making multiplayer games is still hard in 2024; hosting servers is a pain and tools like ChatGPT struggle to write code for multiplayer games due to inconsistent networking APIs.
This is why we're building Dreamlab, a new open-source multiplayer game engine. Our mission it to make multiplayer game development accessible to everyone. We are creating the open-source multiplayer game engine. Networking is a first-class abstraction and games can be scripted using elegant TypeScript.
The original version of Dreamlab used node.js and multiple npm packages. The biggest problem we faced with this was dependency management. During development, we had to use npm link, keep build processes constantly running, and even manually overwrite our libraries in node_modules to get things working. This sucked!
We solved this problem by switching to a Deno monorepo. Now, instead of having to switch between a tagged version and a local package, we can always reference the local copy:
