Building multiplayer games is hard. Building multiplayer educational games that need to be curriculum-aligned, pedagogically sound, and instantly scalable is an entirely different challenge. That’s exactly what we’re tackling with Rumbles on Edzy - multiplayer games based on the CBSE curriculum that students can play directly from the platform.
The core constraint that shapes everything about Rumbles is scale. When a teacher announces a Rumble session to their class, we need to handle 30 students connecting simultaneously. When a school runs a competition, that number jumps to hundreds. And when we run platform-wide events, we’re looking at thousands of concurrent players, all competing in real-time on curriculum-based questions. The infrastructure needs to handle this gracefully without degradation in experience.
The technical architecture needed to support this involves several key components working in concert. Real-time communication happens through WebSockets, allowing instant updates of game state, player actions, and leaderboard changes. But WebSockets alone aren’t sufficient - the backend needs to efficiently manage game rooms, handle player connections and disconnections gracefully, and ensure state consistency across all connected clients. We use Redis for managing transient game state and player sessions, which gives us the performance characteristics needed for real-time gameplay.
The game mechanics themselves are designed around educational content from the CBSE curriculum. Questions are dynamically selected based on the subject, grade level, and specific topics being covered. The multiplayer aspect isn’t just bolted on - it’s integral to the learning experience. Students compete in various formats: time-based challenges where speed and accuracy matter, collaborative modes where teams work together to solve problems, and tournament structures that run over days or weeks.
One of the more interesting technical challenges is ensuring fairness in a competitive educational environment. Network latency can’t give some students an unfair advantage over others. Question difficulty needs to be balanced. The scoring system needs to reward both speed and accuracy appropriately. We’ve built sophisticated algorithms that normalize for these factors, adjusting scores based on observed latency, question difficulty ratings, and player performance history.
The curriculum alignment requirement adds another layer of complexity. Every question in a Rumble needs to map to specific learning objectives in the CBSE curriculum. The game needs to provide meaningful learning analytics back to teachers - not just who won, but what concepts students struggled with, where misconceptions exist, and how performance changes over time. This means the game system needs to capture and process detailed interaction data while maintaining the real-time performance characteristics needed for engaging gameplay.
From a product perspective, making Rumbles work within the broader Edzy platform means seamless integration with the existing classroom experience. Teachers can launch a Rumble from their ongoing lesson, selecting topics that align with what they’re teaching that day. Students access it without leaving the platform or downloading separate apps. Results feed back into the learning analytics system automatically. The game experience needs to feel fluid and native, not like a separate application.
The scaling characteristics depend heavily on load distribution and caching strategies. Game servers are distributed across regions to minimize latency. Static assets like question images and sound effects are served through a CDN. The database layer uses read replicas for serving game content while writes for player scores and actions go to the primary database. When a particularly popular Rumble is running, we can spin up additional game server instances automatically based on player demand.
Building this has required balancing multiple competing concerns: educational value versus engagement, scalability versus feature richness, real-time performance versus data accuracy. The technology stack includes Node.js for the game servers, React for the frontend, PostgreSQL for persistent data, and Redis for real-time state management. The monitoring and observability layer helps us understand where bottlenecks emerge under load and how player behavior changes with different game mechanics.
What makes this particularly interesting is that we’re not just building games - we’re building an infrastructure for educational game experiences that can evolve over time. New game modes, different question formats, subject-specific mechanics - all of these need to be supported by the underlying platform architecture. The system needs to be extensible enough to accommodate future innovations while remaining reliable enough to handle thousands of students playing right now.
The immediate feedback we get from students and teachers helps refine both the gameplay and the learning effectiveness. When a particular question type leads to better retention, we can incorporate more of it. When a game mechanic proves too confusing, we can simplify it. This iterative improvement process, grounded in actual usage data from real classrooms, makes Rumbles better with each modification.
Building scalable multiplayer educational games means constantly navigating the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and user experience. Each decision affects the others. The technical architecture enables certain game mechanics. The game mechanics support specific learning outcomes. The learning outcomes need to align with curriculum requirements. Getting all of these pieces to work together at scale is the ongoing challenge that makes this work compelling.