The latest articles on DEV Community by Emilis M (@emilism). https://dev.to/emilism https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4076573%2Fd2549a39-45ae-4833-8407-d3d3dfe51f8d.png https://dev.to/emilism en Emilis M Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:13:37 +0000 https://dev.to/emilism/building-a-multiplayer-game-with-no-game-server-postgres-realtime-as-the-state-machine-202b https://dev.to/emilism/building-a-multiplayer-game-with-no-game-server-postgres-realtime-as-the-state-machine-202b <p>Aux Battles is a free multiplayer music game: rooms, players, prompts, voting, all synced live across every connected browser. There's no game server behind it. Every client subscribes to Postgres changes through Supabase Realtime and reacts to a single <code>phase</code> column on the room row.</p> <p>Actions are direct table writes. Host-only actions (starting a round, advancing a song) are enforced in the UI, not by row-level security, since the alternative is threading session identity through anonymous auth in a way that adds complexity without adding real protection for a free, no-login game.</p> <p>The trickiest part was the Twitch bracket tournament mode: a full 64-song knockout tree lives in a single jsonb column, <code>rooms.bracket</code>, written with a compare-and-set sequence token (<code>bracket_seq</code>) so that a double-tapped winner button, or a streamer and a mod acting at the same time, becomes a no-op instead of a race condition. <a href="https://auxbattles.app/" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a></p> webdev javascript beginners