Build multiplayer games with Asobi
Asobi is an open-source game backend built on Erlang/OTP. Write your game logic in Lua, hot-reload it without kicking players, and run it your way: self-host it, or deploy to managed cloud. Prefer the BEAM? Asobi is a plain Erlang library underneath, so you can use it directly too.
Get a game running in minutes
Self-host - free, no account needed
Open source, Docker only. Runs fully local - no signup, no credentials, no cost. About 5 minutes.
docker compose up -d
# your Lua game + Postgres, server on http://localhost:8084Deploy to cloud - we run it
No Docker, no database to manage - we run it, EU-hosted. Deploy to a managed environment in about 10 minutes.
asobi login
asobi init mygame
asobi create prod
asobi deploy prod luaStart here
Quick start
Run the server, write a Lua game, connect a client - about 10 minutes.
Core concepts
Matches, worlds, zones, voting, phases. The primitives Asobi gives you.
Samples
Complete games you scaffold and run in two commands.
Tic-tac-toe
Your first Asobi game. Two players, one match, authoritative Lua.
Lua API
Full reference for the game.* API available in your Lua scripts.
Erlang API (advanced)
Embedding Asobi in an OTP app? The native behaviours and modules.
Cookbook
Copy-pasteable recipes for common patterns.
Self-host
Run Asobi on your own infrastructure. Docker, bare metal, or k8s.
Why Asobi?
You write game logic in Lua - fast iteration, what game devs already know - running on the BEAM, which gives you:
- Restart-free hot reload. Deploy new code without disconnecting players. Works for both Lua bundles and Erlang beams. Nobody else on the market does this.
- Fault tolerance. Crash one match, others keep running. OTP supervision trees isolate failures.
- Concurrency. One process per match, one process per zone. Scales to hundreds of thousands on one node.
- An Erlang escape hatch. Need behaviour-level control for a hot loop? Drop into Erlang - your Lua and the native path call the same
asobi_matchbehaviour underneath.
Hosting
Asobi is fully self-hostable - see the self-host guide. If you'd rather we run it for you, managed cloud hosting is live at asobi.dev/cloud.
Want something that isn't here?
These docs are new and growing. If a page is missing, shallow, or wrong: open an issue or drop into the Discord.