Try out a new backend-as-a-service for multiplayer game development

[Alec]

Hi there, 

I'm Alec, a founder of Convergence, a platform for developing realtime collaborative applications.  We have built an API for developers to quickly build out real-time collaboration features in their applications, but I suspect there could be some compelling use cases for multiplayer game development as well.  The core of the platform is synchronizing state; so ideally you could just define the game state and we handle the mutation events for you.  We also treat users, presence, chat, and activities such as mouse movements as first-class citizens, minimizing the boilerplate code you would need for a lot of multiplayer games.

We would be super psyched if a few of you fine folk wanted to play around with the API -- the platform is live and ready for use; we even have some documentation to get you started.  It is in alpha and free of charge.  Check it out at https://convergencelabs.com and mention this forum when you sign up; we'll get you started right away.

Happy game hacking! And of course, feel free to PM me with any questions.  Cheers.

[vamos]

I've got multiplayer sorted for my current game, but this looks very intriguing and I'm bookmarking it for my future projects.

However I'd like to ask what pricing is going to be like after the initial alpha period... that's going to be a big factor in deciding whether to use it or not.

Also is this something that would run on your server, or would we be able to, say, buy a license and integrate it with our node.js server so it runs on our machine?

[Alec]

Thanks for the inquiry -- we don't have enough data yet to make any firm pricing decisions, but it will be comparable to something like Firebase.  We will always have a free tier for people to try it out, with the next tier being something like $20-50 / month.  

A big part of the value proposition is making it easy for folks to get started and not having to worry about infrastructure, so at this point we are pursuing the hosted model. We are exploring on-premise licensing options for "enterprisey" customers, but chances are that if you are the type of developer needing total control of your infrastructure, it wouldn't be a good fit.  I am quite sure that we can provide a massive amount of value out of the gate, however, especially at the point of testing/prototyping game ideas.