Nicheloom

Market intelligence for builders — see what's gaining traction before it's crowded.

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

Details

External ID
46290213
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings
Website domain
drawize.com
Launched
Dec. 16, 2025
Cohort
—
Upvotes
39
Upvotes percentile
0.7805343511450382
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.

Description

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 & MongoDBStorage: 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.

Enrichment

Theme
indie hacker passion projects
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Marketplace
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
multiplayer drawing game with viral community
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Drawing UI and game rooms can be vibe-coded, but maintaining low-latency state synchronization, WebSocket scaling, and canvas rendering across thousands of concurrent players is complex.

What it would actually take: The application requires an HTML5 Canvas client paired with an authoritative WebSocket backend (e.g., Node.js or Go with Redis pub/sub) handling vector coordinate broadcasting, room management, and state replay. Scaling requires clustering WebSocket connections across multiple server instances with sticky sessions or distributed brokers to maintain low latency. Experience with real-time multiplayer networking and socket lifecycle management is necessary.

Discussion

14 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: gametje.com (similar multiplayer game)

Concerns raised: Gaining initial traction with network effect games, Single server capacity under load

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 43 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #13 of 44 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Looks like the first mover among its competitors.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a marketplace tool for Horizontal yet.