Building the SpacetimeDB Database, Game-First (with Tyler Cloutier)
From Developer Voices by Kris Jenkins
February 4, 2026 · 1h 41m
About this episode
Tyler Cloutier returns to discuss the development and launch of SpacetimeDB and its application in the game Bitcraft.
Eighteen months ago, Tyler Cloutier appeared on the show with what sounded like an ambitious (some might say crazy) plan: build a new distributed database from scratch, then use it to power a massively multiplayer online game. That's two of the hardest problems in software, tackled simultaneously. But sometimes the best infrastructure comes from solving your own impossible problems. The game, Bitcraft, has now launched on Steam. SpacetimeDB has hit version 1.0. And Tyler returns to share what actually happened when theory met production reality. We cover the launch day performance disasters (including a cascading failure caused by logging while holding a lock), why single-threaded execution running entirely from L1 cache can outperform sophisticated multi-threaded approaches by two orders of magnitude, and how the database's reducer model - borrowed from functional programming - enables zero-downtime code deployments. We also get into how SpacetimeDB is expanding beyond games with TypeScript support and React hooks that make building real-time multiplayer web apps surprisingly simple. If you're building anything where multiple users need to see the same data update in real time…
People in this episode
Host: Kris Jenkins
Guest: Tyler Cloutier
Topics covered
- distributed database
- massively multiplayer online game
- real-time data
- software infrastructure
- game development
Keywords
- distributed database
- SpacetimeDB
- Bitcraft
- real-time multiplayer
- software performance
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Steam, Figma, Facebook
Products: SpacetimeDB, Bitcraft
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