Day one: a trade run on a real server
The first playable trade run, a thousand bots on the road, and a backend that held a raid.
Amber Road Online started as a question: can a browser game carry a convoy of players and a raid on top of them? On day one we built the smallest game that could answer it: buy a load, walk it down a road, sell it somewhere else.
- A thousand bots walked the road on about a third of one server thread.
- A raid of fifty on the hosted server ran with 112 ms of lag at worst, so raids are capped at a hundred players in one place.
- Every coin goes in a ledger, with kill switches for each part of the economy, before a single tester arrives.
By the evening the world was 5.2 by 2.6 kilometres, baked from map files, with three markets, prices that depend on the road you take, and bandits waiting along it.