A browser-first multiplayer trading and territorial-control game on Cloudflare Workers, a spiritual successor to Diaspora, a game I played as a kid. With AI making coding so fast, I wanted to see how easy it would be to replicate.
I'm not sharing the code or a link yet, but I'll try to get around to that.
What's playable
The prototype is well past graybox.
- Dock, travel between sectors, and pull up a jump map.
- Trade at station markets that hold persistent stock.
- Flip between cockpit and berth views.
- Ships carry hull, armor and weapons.
- Encounters in transit sectors are turn-based, and losing a fight still pays out salvage.
Player state persists in memory or D1, depending on the session.
What's missing
Most of the actual game:
- real auth and accounts
- contracts
- ship fitting beyond the starter loadout
- fuel and travel-cost friction
- broader NPC ecology
- reputation, factions and guilds
- territorial control
Why on Workers
Sector state, market state, ship state and encounters all benefit from running close to the player, and Workers + D1 + Durable Objects handles that well. It's also an interesting technical excuse on its own.
And it's easy to ship things to Cloudflare. You can play with them, share them, and ignore them until you're ready to pick them up again.