Multiplayer Collaboration with Ably: Guidance and resources

This guide helps you to understand the Ably features that support collaborative multiplayer experiences in your application. It combines materials from our documentation, demos and tutorials, to provide the resources you need to start building collaboration features into your application.

  • Learn about the core Ably concepts for Multiplayer collaboration
  • Understand where Ably fits into your architecture
  • See how Ably can power different multiplayer features
How Ably Works

How Ably works

Ably offers simple APIs to stream data between devices and backend services in realtime. Using these data streams and events you can power realtime features and provide live experiences to your end-users.

Ably's messaging capabilities follow a pub/sub pattern and the platform ensures that any messages published to it are received in realtime by any number of subscribing devices. Ably provides support for WebSockets by default, with other fallback transports in place, and its distributed infrastructure dynamically scales to support your realtime traffic.

Ably can be positioned at the heart of your architecture and used as an integral messaging platform between front-end and back-end clients. Ably SDKs are available in multiple programming languages. In addition various Ably Integrations enable outbound and inbound data streaming to and from your services, such as databases and stream processors.

Ably’s Spaces product comes with a purpose-built SDK that builds on Ably’s core capabilities. It makes it easy to build collaborative environments around your application showing the actions and presence of users.

Diagram of how Ably works

Diagram 1: Ably in your System Design