As part of building Promenad, I’m constantly looking for ways to push our platform into interesting territory. Not just "can it do this?" but "what happens when we actually try to build something real with it?"
One of the ways we do that at Orca Pings is by building internal prototypes that stress-test the system in ways typical business apps never will. Games are perfect for this. They’re demanding, state-heavy, and unforgiving when performance or data consistency breaks down. If a platform can support a multiplayer game, it can usually support just about anything else.
So I decided to build a prototype of a sci-fi browser-based text MMORPG using Promenad’s Game Registry API.
Why this project was personally exciting
I grew up playing early browser-based MMORPGs and online text games. They were clunky, slow, and sometimes barely held together, but they were also magical. You logged in, the world was persistent, other players were there, and every small action felt meaningful. Those games were a big part of what pulled me into both game design and systems design in the first place.
Years later, I now find myself building platforms and infrastructure. There’s something very full-circle about using a modern API stack to prototype the kind of game experiences that originally got me excited about the web as a medium for interactive worlds.
How Promenad fits into this
What makes this experiment interesting isn’t just that we’re building a game, but how we’re building it.
Promenad’s Game Registry API was designed to support complex batches of queries in a single request. That might sound abstract, but for browser-based MMORPGs, it’s a big deal. Instead of hammering the server with lots of small calls for movement, scanning, combat, inventory updates, NPC state, and world events, we can orchestrate those interactions as cohesive operations.
From a platform perspective, this forces us to think carefully about:
- How we model game state
- How we batch and validate multi-step actions
- How we keep gameplay responsive without overwhelming the API
- How we structure data so it scales beyond simple CRUD
- Building a game on top of Promenad exposes edge cases that typical business workflows never hit. That’s exactly what we want. These experiments shape how the platform evolves.
Why we build prototypes like this
A big part of our philosophy at Orca Pings is that platforms shouldn’t be designed in a vacuum. We don’t just build APIs and hope they’ll work for real products. We actively try to break our own systems by using them in creative, demanding ways.
Prototyping a browser MMORPG forces us to:
- Think about performance under frequent state changes
- Design APIs that feel natural for interactive systems
- Build tooling that makes iteration fast
- Identify bottlenecks early, before real customers hit them
This kind of hands-on experimentation directly informs how Promenad grows. The platform becomes more robust not because we planned every edge case on paper, but because we ran into them while building something real.
Supporting indie studios and experimental games
One of the things I’m genuinely excited about is how this kind of architecture can support indie studios and solo developers. Big engines and platforms are powerful, but they also come with real overhead, both technically and financially. Not every project needs that level of complexity on day one.
Promenad makes it possible to stand up playable prototypes quickly, test mechanics, and validate ideas without heavy upfront investment. For small teams, that flexibility can be the difference between a project staying a side experiment or becoming something worth pursuing seriously.
Want to playtest?
This prototype is still very much in development, but if you’re curious about early browser-based MMORPGs, text-driven game worlds, or just want to poke at something experimental, I’d love to hear from you.
We’re always looking for early playtesters and feedback, both to improve the game prototype itself and to continue shaping Promenad into a platform that’s genuinely useful for building interactive systems.
If you’re an indie developer and want to explore using Promenad to prototype your own game ideas, we’re also happy to chat.