A real example
Avaryn
A strategy RPG in the browser that I'm building right now, now in closed alpha. A sneak peek at the world, the real 3D models, the key art and the systems behind it.
Avaryn is a fantasy world where the player chooses a people and a class, crosses a continent of rival powers and dragons, builds a home, learns a trade and leads their own strategy. The first charted continent is Vaelora, and the game begins in the Mirefen wetlands.
I'm building Avaryn on my own. It is my own project and the clearest example of what I mean by building games: rules, world, graphics and server belong to one codebase.
Straight from the engine
Real models, drawn live in your browser
Every creature and building below is the same file the game loads: compressed geometry, KTX2 textures and baked-in animation clips. Pick something to look at and drag to turn it.
Live in the browser Drag to turn Mirebeak
The frontier's stalking predator. Hooked beak, ragged plumage, and a habit of circling the raised roads at dusk.
Creatures play their own idle and attack clips. The buildings come from the same environment kit the Fenwatch settlement is built from.
The engineering behind it
Built like a real online service, not a demo
Avaryn is a persistent, MMO-style world with the server as referee. Everything below lives in one codebase: simulation, networking, database, infrastructure as code and full observability.
- 50+ concurrent players per node
- 18 regions in one continuous world
- 4 players per real-time party
- 3 signals: metrics, logs and traces
- 01
The server has the final say
Every move, strike and card goes to the server, which simulates the world in fixed ticks and sends back what actually happened. Idle ticks create no traffic, and the database never receives a row per movement.
- 02
Real-time parties and dungeons
Up to four players form a party, share quests and enter tactical battles by unanimous decision. Dungeons are instanced with fixed difficulty, and a dropped connection does not break membership.
- 03
Kubernetes with infrastructure as code
The cluster runs on k3s at Hetzner and is described entirely in Pulumi: firewall, volumes, cert-manager, PostgreSQL through CloudNativePG and ingress behind Cloudflare. Deployments use immutable image digests.
- 04
Metrics, logs and traces
Prometheus metrics in Mimir, structured OTLP logs in Loki and traces in Tempo, collected by an OpenTelemetry Collector. Grafana shows player journeys plus service and database performance.
- 05
Security on every connection
Signed game tickets, origin allowlists for WebSocket and CSRF, HTTP-only cookies and periodic revalidation of open connections so that revoked access is actually cut off.
- 06
Backup, restore and delivery
Continuous WAL archiving and daily base backups to separate object storage, with a rehearsed restore runbook. GitHub Actions verifies, builds and publishes all four images.
The systems behind the world
How Avaryn works
- 01
The world carries on without you
Regions join into a continent you can walk across. When you cross a border you keep walking, the camera follows and the next region loads around you. The world lives on the server, even while you are logged out.
- 02
The server has the final say
Every move and every strike goes to the server, which works out what actually happened. Nobody can cheat by editing their own client, and if your connection drops you pick up where you were.
- 03
Your commander and your party
You play a commander who reaches level 30 and collects skills on a hotbar. Fights play out in tactical encounters with fog of war, construction and orders to your party.
- 04
Trades are learned from people
A smith teaches you smithing at his forge. You mine ore underground, refine it into stock and forge equipment that matters in combat. Every player gets their own ore from the same vein.
- 05
Peoples, dragons and politics
Humans, Felis, Goblins and Groovians have their own histories and interests. Dragons hold territory and political weight. The story is told by an old narrator's voice and staged as scenes inside the living world.
- 06
Built for the browser
Nothing to install. Avaryn runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, with graphics that favour readability and character over realism.
From playavaryn.com
Screenshots of the new landing page, where the engine draws the settlement and the bestiary live in the browser.
-
Fenwatch drawn live on playavaryn.com: warden hall, palisade, lantern yards and the fen beyond the gate -
The bestiary: every creature opens with its rules, its numbers and a turning model -
The new Avaryn landing page, with key art, embers and the closed alpha signup
Want to build something like it?
Games, simulations or real-time experiences. Tell me what you have in mind.