Small games keep re-solving the same platform problems.
MiniAnt Games' pitch is to play instantly, with no downloads. That promise only holds if matchmaking, a realtime relay, spectating and a currency system already exist before a game ships, so the portal owns them instead of each game rebuilding them. The portal also lets outside developers publish their own games, which raises a second problem: running someone else's code without trusting it.
The portal owns the hard parts; the relay stays rules-blind.
Matchmaking, rooms and relay tokens are owned by the portal, not by any individual game. The realtime relay runs on Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects with WebSocket hibernation, and it is rules-blind: it moves messages, it does not referee the game. Third-party games run inside a sandboxed frame under a trust-tier integrity model, and a developer publishing a game passes an anti-cheat questionnaire and ships through a validator CLI. Spectating works the same way for every game: each one publishes JSON snapshots of its own state. There is a single currency, Tickets, and a game can request a spend but can never grant currency itself.
Five game modes, one architecture.
The same bounded-domain modules power all five game modes — solo, vs AI, local multiplayer, online with friends and online random — instead of each mode being a special case. Because the relay never referees a match, the trust boundary sits at the sandboxed game frame instead of the network layer.
- Game modes
- 5
- Bounded-domain modules
- 15
- Architecture decision records
- 8
Built with
- Next.js 15
- React 19
- Tailwind 4
- Cloudflare Workers
- Durable Objects
- Supabase
- Drizzle