Show HN: My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings

[lombarovic]

Hi HN,

I built the first version of Drawize back in late 2016 specifically for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest. I crunched and built the whole thing (including the real-time multiplayer engine) in under 4 weeks.

It didn’t win anything in the contest.

Since it was built with web tech anyway, I published it on the open web in early 2017 just to see what would happen. It started living its own life, and today — 8 years later — the database processed the 100,000,000th drawing.

On the busiest days it’s been 30k+ active users, and storing 100M drawings currently sits at ~3.16 TB.

The milestone moment: I was watching live logs today, terrified the 100Mth drawing would be NSFW. Luckily, the RNG gods smiled and it turned out to be a Red Balloon (You can see the 100Mth drawing here: https://www.drawize.com/blog/100-million-drawings-milestone)

Tech stack (boring but fast):

Backend: .NET + WebSockets (real-time sync)

Frontend: hand-coded HTML/JS + jQuery (no React, no bundlers)

Data: PostgreSQL & MongoDB

Storage: Wasabi Cloud (moved there to save on S3 costs)

Scaling as a solo dev: real-time lobbies + reconnection edge cases + moderation/content filtering. I use content classification models trained in 2021 to filter bad content, and the real-time multiplayer side is mostly highly optimized .NET code.

Happy to answer questions about the “failed” Tizen origin, real-time multiplayer on the web, moderation, or how .NET handles the load.

[dylanhouli]

Wow really nicely built site and great story behind it.

I'd imagine you didn't just publish it in 2017 and magically start gaining traffic. Any good marketing tips learned along the way? It must've been tough at first since this type of game seems to get more fun the more players you have.

Anywhere I could read more about how you got your first users and such? I'm about to launch another one of my own web projects and marketing is always the toughest part.

[barbegal]

Congratulations! Works amazingly well.

Does it generate enough revenue to be self sustaining?

[lombarovic]

Thank you! I really appreciate the kind words regarding performance.

Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.

The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.

[jmpavlec]

Really well done! Not sure how I never stumbled on your game as I am doing something quite similar (https://gametje.com/). I'm also hosting on a minimal server stack with "boring" tech. Would love to have a chat if you are open to it. I'll send you an email on your support email.

[lombarovic]

Thanks! Always good to see other folks sticking to simple architecture — it really pays off in the long run.

Feel free to shoot me an email, though I am currently swamped with the responses here and the Academy launch, so apologies if I am slow to reply!

[sacredSatan]

Amazing achievement! I just wanted to point out that the linked blog page has an incorrect publish date. It says "Published: 12/15/2024"

[lombarovic]

Good catch! I guess I am still mentally stuck in 2024.

Fixing it now, thanks for letting me know!

[wildest-boar]

It's ridiculously fast how many regions are you deployed and how it's soooo fast ?

[lombarovic]

Thank you! I am slightly obsessed with optimization, so hearing that means a lot.

You might be surprised — the game is actually deployed in just one region (US) on only two dedicated servers (Contabo).

Here is the breakdown of why it feels fast:

1. The Metal: I use one server for the Web App + Gameplay Backend (.NET), and a second server strictly for PostgreSQL and MongoDB. No virtualization overhead.

2. The Network: I use Cloudflare for static content, which handles the initial global load speed.

3. Aggressive Prefetching: I rely heavily on ServiceWorkers. When you land on the home page, the 'Play' page and game assets are already being prefetched in the background. When you click play, it loads instantly from the local cache.

4. Single WebSocket: Once connected, there is zero HTTP overhead. Every interaction — gameplay, chat, UI updates — travels through a single persistent WebSocket connection.

Keeping the architecture simple (monolith-ish) rather than distributed helps me keep the latency predictable and maintenance low.

[pengaru]

Fun!