Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

That is a fast turnaround, nice 🎮 One thing worth checking before you settle on 10 seconds though.

When I ran Random Match yesterday it took about 11 seconds to pair me with a real opponent. A 10-second cutoff would have preempted that match entirely — I would have been handed a CPU roughly one second before a human arrived.

Your real pairing time and your fallback threshold are close enough that this matters. Before fixing the number, it is worth logging the distribution of your successful human pairings. If most of them land in the 8-15 second band, a 10s fallback quietly converts the majority of your multiplayer into single player, which is the opposite of what you want now that matchmaking demonstrably works.

Two things that make the fallback safer whatever number you pick:

Say it out loud. If the CPU swap is seamless and silent, a player who wins assumes they beat a human, and finding out later feels like being tricked. “Nobody around right now, you are playing a CPU” costs nothing and buys trust — and it also explains the thing players would otherwise interpret as your netcode behaving oddly.

Keep searching during the bot match. If a human enters the queue 30 seconds in, hot-swap them into the CPU’s slot. That way the fallback is genuinely just filling dead air rather than replacing the mode, and your concurrency stops being a hard gate on whether anyone ever meets a real opponent.

Hi HKM Industry,

Wow, thank you for following up! You are completely right about the 10-second cutoff. I will definitely increase the bot fallback threshold to 15-20 seconds so I don't accidentally kill real human matches.

Adding a 'Playing against CPU' text is a great call for transparency. Honesty is the best policy! Your 'hot-swapping' idea (replacing the CPU mid-match if a human queues up) is absolute genius. Since I am coding this solo with a basic Firebase setup, that dynamic swapping is a bit complex for me right now, but I am adding it straight to my core feature list for the next major update.

I am just a college student in India, trying to learn game dev on a broken laptop, and this level of pro-feedback is a literal goldmine for me. I actually put the complete source code of this game up on Ko-fi and Gumroad recently, just trying to save up for my college tuition and a working PC. If you ever feel like supporting a young dev's journey (or know anyone who needs a solid multiplayer template), it would mean the world to me! 🙏

Also, I am trying to build my small community on Game Jolt as well (link is on my itch profile). If you post your devlogs or games there, I would love to follow your work!

By the way, do you use Discord? I would really love to connect and chat more about browser multiplayer networking sometime. Thank you again for your time and wisdom! 🚀🔥