Dungeons, an open overworld, guilds, trading, crafting and PvP. I write the server and the client, design the content, and run it in production.
Design
- Deserted Tomb: light eight trial rooms to wake the boss. Light them all within a minute and it wakes in hard mode.
- PvP island: you can attack anyone outside your guild. New arrivals get 15 seconds of protection, and a fight tag stops you escaping mid-fight.
- Allies: summons, turrets and pets share one system, and you choose whose you see.
- Enemy levels: each enemy gets a level and a rank, and one formula sets its stats.
What I built
- Server: C#/.NET with multithreaded game instances, entity behavior and AI, and persistent player data in Redis and PostgreSQL.
- Player systems: trading and a player market, crafting and transmutation, skill trees, potion storage, quests, inventory and progression.
- Movement and combat: movement, sprint, AI-follow and status effects, with the rules kept in step between client and server.
- Client: the ActionScript and Adobe AIR client, and the current Haxe and OpenFL Windows client (Lime, hxcpp and the Visual Studio C++ toolchain).
- Payments: Stripe tied to player accounts.
- Docs: build steps for the Haxe client and the .NET server, so anyone can build it.
- Playtesting: about 200 to 500 unique testers over the project and 5 to 20 each month, whose feedback steers what I build next.
From the game
C# and .NET
- Game server on .NET 10, running at 10 ticks a second.
- Account and game APIs in the same process, plus a website and balance tool in ASP.NET Core Razor Pages.
- Launcher in WPF and XAML, with checked downloads and self-updates.
- Metrics and logs: Prometheus and Grafana, a tick profiler, and logs split by category.
- Case study: a list of 52,000 enemies froze the server.
More on my C# and .NET work.
More videos
- Item Enchants, Aug 2023
- Quest Showcase, Jun 2025
- Summoner Showcase, Jun 2025
- Item Leveling Showcase, Jun 2025
- Crafting Station Showcase, Jun 2025
History
Started as Cosmic v2, a game I designed with 09 and Delik. I was doing most of the work, so I split off with my own fork, Tidan’s Realm. That became Tidan’s Realm VI, renamed Arcana when I founded Tidan Games in 2026.