Building the Backend for Smarter Games

I'm Donald, and I build https://github.com/beyond-immersion/bannou-service — an open source game backend platform designed for multiplayer games with autonomous NPCs.

What is Bannou?

Bannou is a schema-first monoservice that handles everything from authentication and matchmaking to voice chat and game sessions. But what makes it different is the NPC AI stack: a behavior markup language (ABML), goal-oriented action planning (GOAP), and a distributed actor system designed to run 100,000+ thinking NPCs.

Some of the objectives:

1. Creating an infrastructure flexible enough and resliient enough to handle any deployment strategies, live updates, and scaling requirements. Our first game project, ambitious as it is, absolutely requires this.
2. Massively reducing boilerplate required for new game development projects, developing and providing most of the common tools and services required to get off the ground quickly- we're tired of this dance, and we're sure you are too.
3. Living worlds, characters behaving more than acting, quests being the result of genuinely needing assistance with something, and procedural cinematics — combat encounters that feel authored but emerge naturally from NPC decision-making.

Why Sponsor?

I'm building this largely solo, in the open. Your sponsorship helps me:

• Dedicate more time to Bannou development in general
• Develop features that we don't necessarily need, but others might
• Keep the project MIT licensed and free for everyone
• Build SDKs for more game engines
• Write better documentation and tutorials

Every contribution, no matter the size, helps keep this project moving forward.

Connect

• https://discord.gg/3eAGYwF3rE — Chat with me and other developers
• https://github.com/beyond-immersion/bannou-service — Star, fork, contribute

Thank you for considering sponsoring my work!