How has the 20-person Clockwork Labs studio been able to put together its sandbox MMORPG BitCraft? With the use of its bespoke backend engine known as SpacetimeDB, and now the studio has elected to release the engine’s source code to GitHub in order to grant other smaller studios the ability to craft MMORPGs. Here’s Clockwork co-founder Tyler Cloutier to explain:
“Indie game developers are largely restricted to making single player games. The only tech you need for a single player game is a game engine like Unity or Unreal. Hosting a multiplayer game requires intimate knowledge of maybe 20 to 30 cloud services and technologies and an ops team to manage it all. By contrast, our BitCraft developers only need one: SpacetimeDB.”
Described as a “database and server combined into one,” SpacetimeDB is roughly explained as similar to a smart contract system that’s been used for blockchain games but without any association to crypto or blockchain tech whatsoever (since it’s its own database). Clockwork has also released a Testnet cloud service that will grant developers an easy way to deploy their SpacetimeDB apps to the cloud, while a production-ready Mainnet cloud will be released next year.
Clockwork cautions that this current source code is still in an alpha state and will likely have some performance issues and bugs in its current iteration until the company releases the 1.0 version sometime next year. For now, indies who are looking to put together MMORPGs of their own may now have a potentially powerful tool in their belts.
