Roamadic

A persistent low poly world you share with whoever else is around. One link puts you in the world in seconds, no signup, and then you walk, emote, and show your look alongside whoever is there. I built it under the dev name glade and it lives at roamadic.app.

The worlds

Three worlds ship: a forest park on real rolling terrain, a street grid city with driveable cars, and a cozy farm. Each world hosts its own activity on a shared countdown. The park has a soccer pitch, a ball that is always live for a kickabout plus scheduled team matches, and the top scorer wears a crown. The farm runs a timed pumpkin harvest.

The park's ground is a baked heightfield rather than a flat plane, so the ball has real gravity and runs downhill, and a climb costs a walker speed.

The backend

The whole thing runs on Vercel functions and one Redis database, there is no game server anywhere. Each player's WebSocket lands on its own relay function, and one ticker function per room steps the simulation at 20Hz, holding a lease and handing off to a successor before the platform can kill it. A full 20 player room costs about $30 a month. I wrote up the whole design in Running a 20Hz game world on serverless functions.

Build

The characters and kits are Polyfork, the stack is Next.js and TypeScript on Vercel with Upstash Redis, and the simulation core is pure TypeScript with no socket or Redis imports, so it can move hosts without changes. Fun alone, better with two, alive at twenty.