TechPrufer
Get started
Temporal
Temporal logoTemporal · Feature trail

Game Development with Temporal

2 posts · Aug 2023 – Feb 2025

What this trail covers

Temporal Workflows are used to build and orchestrate complex applications, including multiplayer games. This post details the development of a trivia game, showcasing how Workflows can manage game state, player interactions, and integrate with external services like ChatGPT for question generation. The game evolved through multiple versions, demonstrating iterative development and the application of Temporal's durable execution, signals, queries, and timers. Polyglot development was also highlighted. Layer.ai uses Temporal to streamline AI-driven workflows for scalable game asset production, offloading heavy tasks like asset generation and file processing to prevent server bottlenecks and improve user experience. Temporal's built-in retries and observability provide better control over task execution, reducing failures and ensuring reliability. The 'FileUploadWorkflow' example demonstrates handling retries, timeouts, and checks for file upload and processing.

All Temporal trails
  1. How Layer.ai is upgrading mobile game designThis post details how Layer.ai uses Temporal to manage AI-driven workflows for game asset production. It highlights the technical challenges of generative AI, such as model permutations and training methods, and how early backend implementations led to bottlenecks and frequent task failures. Layer.ai integrated Temporal to decouple heavy asynchronous tasks (file pre-processing, model inference, post-processing) from their main servers, improving performance and user experience. Temporal's durable workflows and built-in retries ensure task reliability and consistency under high demand. An example 'FileUploadWorkflow' is provided, showcasing the use of `workflow.wait_condition`, `workflow.execute_activity_method` with retry policies, and `workflow.execute_child_workflow` for managing file uploads and post-processing, demonstrating Temporal's role in preventing failures and ensuring smooth pipeline execution.
  2. Snakes, chaos, and the resilience of Temporal: A live demo breakdownThis post details the implementation of a live, multiplayer snake game as a demo for Temporal's resilience. It describes how Workflows were used to manage the game, rounds, and individual snakes. The demo intentionally introduced chaos by restarting Workers when apples were eaten and by physically unplugging network cables, showcasing Temporal's ability to recover from induced outages. The post highlights the use of Socket.io for real-time UI updates and the choice of the Go SDK for worker implementation due to performance needs on tablets. It emphasizes that Temporal's Durable Execution model handles state persistence and recovery, freeing developers from writing explicit error handling code.
  3. The making of Temporal triviaThis post details the development of a Temporal Trivia game, a hackathon project. It describes the architecture using two workflows (`GameWorkflow` and `AddPlayerWorkflow`) for managing game state, player joining, and question/answer handling. It highlights the use of Activities for API calls (ChatGPT, moderation), Queries for exposing game state, Signals for player submissions and scoring, and Timers for game progression. The post also discusses frontend development iterations (SMS/SvelteKit to browser/Flask) and key learnings around keeping logic in one place, workflow decomposition, moderation service integration, and iterative MVP development. Future improvements include using JSON for ChatGPT responses and Workflow Updates for more efficient querying/signaling.