A practical roadmap for the backend of multiplayer games — taught by doing. From network programming and sockets to authoritative game servers and netcode, server concurrency at scale, persistence and matchmaking, anti-cheat, and the cloud infrastructure that keeps live games running for thousands of players.
Server-side game development sits on top of general backend engineering and an understanding of how games play out on the client. Be comfortable writing code and reasoning about client-side game loops before taking on authoritative servers and netcode.
A reference to follow when implementing a real network project.