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@ Nostr Game Engine
2025-06-13 09:25:28I'm excited to announce that Nostr Game Engine just reached its first development milestone: v0.0.
What is Nostr Game Engine?
Nostr Game Engine is built on top of the modular and proven jMonkeyEngine.
What sets it apart? Its internals are being gradually replaced with Nostr-powered modules, turning it into a reference engine purpose-built for decentralized games.
This first release delivers these key capabilities:
Peer-to-Peer Networking
Forget centralized game servers. Nostr Game Engine gives you real P2P multiplayer, using WebRTC for data streaming and Nostr relays for coordination.
Want to dig deeper? This is a draft NIP that is a revised version of this other draft NIP, that details how the signaling works.
WebRTC is already a solid and reliable peer-to-peer protocol, equipped with a full set of NAT traversal capabilities, but its signaling phase typically relies on specialized central servers.
By coupling WebRTC with Nostr, we take signaling decentralized too by relying on a network of dumb public relays that are oblivious to what encrypted data we send to them and are easily replaceable.
(see the documentation for more info)
Nostr Authentication & Gamertags
NGE has a fully managed Nostr Auth flow, with support for NIP-49 encrypted local nsecs and NIP-46 remote signers.
It also fully handles metadata, including external identities: your profile picture, display name, and other details can carry over between games, and even from other Nostr clients and communities.
This release is also introducing Gamertags: persistent gaming handles tied to your Nostr pubkey. They are like Xbox Gamertags or the old Discord handle, but they’re decentralized and follow you across any game that supports them (check this draft nip for more info).
Match Making
While matchmaking is planned for a later milestone on the roadmap, this release ships with an early implementation to help test RTC connections.
This initial implementation has the APIs to create lobbies that are discoverable and optionally password-protected. Players can search and filter for lobbies using both client-side and relay-side filtering, depending on what the relay supports.
Right now, you can’t see how many players are in a lobby, and the feature is still a bit rough around the edges, but it's a solid start, and more improvements are coming as we move further along the roadmap.
The cool part? You don’t even need to know Nostr is running under the hood. The engine exposes simple APIs like createLobby, findLobbies, and connectToLobby, the developer can call them when needed, and the engine handles all the relay querying and data stitching behind the scenes.
(see the documentation for more info)
A new Nostr Client Library
The engine uses a new Nostr client library built from scratch, designed for performance, asynchronicity, and memory efficiency. It’s lean, fast, and built to be the foundation for everything that comes next.
Cross-Platform and language of choice
The entire codebase is written mostly in Java, and it builds natively for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Support for Android, iOS, and Web Browsers is on the roadmap.
What has been built so far?
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Version 0.0, with the core features mentioned above
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Documentation covering the key components of the engine
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An app template to help bootstrap projects and experiment with the engine
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An high performance and portable nostr client library
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A tech demo (more on that later)
So now, you can get a real feel for the engine, see what it does, play around with it, and maybe even start experimenting with your own ideas.
Roadmap
This is just the beginning. There is a full roadmap on the website.
Upcoming milestones include ads, deeper identity features, and tools that make decentralized game development as smooth as possible.
Sea of Nostriches
This is a demo built for this release.
You start alone in an open ocean with a boat, nothing much at first.
But as soon as another player joins (another peer), your boat begins sending data directly to theirs via peer-to-peer communication. You’ll see this visualized as a stream of numbers moving between boats in game.
If you have a profile picture set, it’ll automatically appear on your boat’s sail, and you’ll see others’ profile pictures on theirs.
That’s the core of it.
It is not a real game, as there is nothing really to do, no lag compensation, no score etc… but it is a decent reference, and an “integration test” for this release.
There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes, like how the ocean is simulated or how rendering is handled, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. You can check out the full source code on GitHub, along with native builds for all supported platforms and a portable JAR.
That’s all for now! Huge thanks go to nostr:nprofile1qythwumn8ghj7ct5d3shxtnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcqypu8xwr40lp96ewdj2fef408wy70gd3carf9n6xu7hrnhq6whpgly925h0z for making this possible. Their support allows me to dedicate full-time effort to this project and contribute to the growth of the Nostr ecosystem.
Check out the website at ngengine.org and browse the docs at ngengine.org/docs if you want to dig deeper.
Feel free to come up with any questions. I’ll do my best to answer.
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