San Francisco, CA - March 4, 2024 - Clockwork Labs, the creative force behind the highly anticipated sandbox MMORPG BitCraft Online, today announced the release of SpacetimeDB 1.0, the all-in-one server/database backend solution which is the foundation of BitCraft Online.
Small teams, big games
SpacetimeDB is a powerful new tool which gives indie developers the power to make large scale multiplayer games and apps with just a handful of engineers. It’s the technology that has allowed the studio to develop BitCraft Online with a relatively small team for a large-scale MMORPG.
The 1.0 version of SpacetimeDB means that all of the APIs and data formats are stable and signals that application developers can begin to rely on the system in production for their own games.
Studios such as Lightfox Games have already adopted the technology. With a team of 8 engineers the studio concepted, developed, and shipped DeliveryZ to the App Store in only 3 months. Ryan Murphy, founder of Lightfox Games, had high praise after the experience. “We started concepting the game in July, and shipped it to the App Store before Halloween. 95% of the 3 month development time was spent developing the front-end client. The backend was completely plug-and-play. It’s genuinely shocking how easy SpacetimeDB made it to create a persistent open world, which can handle such a massive amount of players in one city.”, Murphy said.
Clockwork Labs founder, Tyler Cloutier, has high hopes for the product. “My dream is that a team of only two or three developers can make the next hit massively multiplayer game. You can be so much more creative on a small budget with big ideas. I cannot wait to see what developers build.”
Clockwork Labs announced the release with a keynote highlighting the product published on their YouTube channel.
Multiplayer Apps
“Not only have we seen game developers take to the product quickly, we’ve also seen application developers building incredible things," Cloutier said. In the keynote, they highlighted Pogly, a collaborative overlay editor like Figma, but for streamers.
“A huge number of streamers have picked it up, and some with large channels, it was actually incredible to see how fast it grew.”
Maincloud
Clockwork Labs is also launching a managed cloud service alongside the 1.0 release of the software product that aims to help developers deploy into production with zero hassle.
For the release of Maincloud they’re also hosting a sale for their cloud credits, called “energy”, for the launch of the product with over 90% discounts. Details about the sale are available at https://spacetimedb.com/maincloud.
About Clockwork Labs
Clockwork Labs is a privately owned video game developer with headquarters in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2019 to apply its founders’ unique engineering backgrounds in distributed systems to video games. The concept for its first project BitCraft attracted investors and industry veterans to join. The company is currently growing.
More information about Clockwork Labs is available at https://clockworklabs.io/