I posted my browser MOBA shooter to 5 subreddits and got 3 upvotes. Then I gave it a map editor.
I've been building railmid for a few weeks. It's a MOBA shooter in a browser tab: no download, 1v1 or 2v2, four weapons and no items, so aim decides it. It started as a single MOBA lane with a tower at each end. Creeps walk out, you last-hit them for gold, and knocking the tower over is the win. It's built with Claude Code and Fredrin.
Last week it grew into six maps you can pick in the lobby, from the original lane to three-lane Crossroads, walls, a rockets-only arena and King of the Hill. There's also a map editor at railmid.com/create where you draw walls, lanes and towers, play your map against the bot, and save it as a file.
On the technical side, each Cloudflare Durable Object runs sixteen arenas on a server-authoritative sim. I first tried alarm() for the tick and it held about 10.76Hz in production, while setInterval holds about 62.5Hz. The client predicts your champion and your own shots, and the server rewinds to check hits against what you saw.
I posted the first version to five subreddits. The results:
- 3 upvotes in total
- 1 removal, because I missed r/Games' Indie Sunday format rules
- 1 comment asking what I built it with and 1 asking whether the netcode uses WebSockets, which it does
My question is for anyone who has launched a multiplayer browser game: what got a stranger to sit down and play their first match? Was it a video, a name for the genre, a map they could make themselves? Play it at https://railmid.com?utm_source=indiehackers
For a multiplayer game, I’d optimize the path to a first match before adding more content: a short clip, a one-line promise, and an obvious “play with a bot” fallback can remove the empty-lobby problem. The map editor feels like a strong retention hook because it gives curious visitors a reason to return even when friends are offline. I’d instrument the funnel from landing page to lobby to completed match so you can see whether the biggest drop is confusion, wait time, or the first-minute experience.
railmid at 3 upvotes across 5 subreddits — then shipping a map editor — is the classic build-instead-of-distribution turn. Soft free text-only week for that first-stranger-match freeze. Reply with one place you’d put a no-download browser MOBA if the next step was five real first matches, not another feature.
The map editor is a great idea. It gives people something to experiment with instead of just asking them to play another browser game. Also, that 10.76Hz vs 62.5Hz production finding is surprisingly interesting.
The bot-match-first idea is already covered above, so two other things.
A 15-second clip at the top of the post: a tower going down or a clean rail kill. People scrolling a feed react to what they can see, and a text post about netcode gets exactly the questions you got, about the stack.
And a scheduled "play with the dev" hour. Something like "I'll be in the 2v2 lobbies tonight at 20:00 UTC, come beat me" in r/WebGames or a small Discord. A stranger is far more likely to try a multiplayer game when they know someone will actually be there, and you get to watch real first matches.
The alarm() vs setInterval numbers are a nice find, by the way. I wouldn't have expected a 6x gap.
Your own results answer part of this: both comments you got were about how it's built, not the game. So the build story may be the hook for now. A dev-subreddit post about holding 62.5Hz with setInterval when alarm() gave 10.76Hz, with a play link at the end, could bring more first matches than a games sub.
For the first match itself, I'd remove every step before firing. At low player counts a stranger can land in an empty lobby, so make the link drop them straight into a bot match on the original lane. We made UtilitySEO's free scan work with no signup for the same reason: at DA 3 and four search visits a month, we can't afford a step between curiosity and value.
The r/Games removal matches our experience too. A sub's format rules matter more than the post.
Does the link land on a lobby or in a match?
After adding the map editor, are you seeing more strangers actually start a first match, or is the strongest response still curiosity about how the game was built?
3 upvotes from 5 subreddits is the classic cold-posting result - reddit smells promotion instantly. the map editor pivot is smart though: give people something to play with instead of something to click. we're learning the same on swapfile.live - showing up with useful answers beats announcing. which subreddit was least hostile?