Coral AI Based Game Engine
Coral is one backend, one mobile shell and one AI pipeline sitting behind many live 1v1 games. AI authors the content, AI plays the opponent when no human is free, and AI reviews every change before it ships. Two games run on it from the same codebase — one live in the stores, one finished and awaiting release.
The problem
Coral exists because each of them is an AI problem wearing a game-development costume.
01
A 1v1 game needs two people in the same second. At launch, in a small market, or at 4am, there is only one — and a player who waits once rarely comes back.
02
Session games burn through content faster than humans can write it, and every prompt has to work in every language you ship, with an answer set that is neither too tight nor too loose.
03
Auth, matchmaking, economy, IAP, ads, social, moderation, admin tooling, store compliance. Every new title pays for it again before it can test whether the game is fun.
The AI layer
Four production systems, all live today in shipped apps — not a roadmap.
Every game carries a pool of AI personas across four skill tiers, each with its own accuracy jitter, personality, momentum arc and daily online schedule. Matchmaking hands you one within seconds when no human is free — so the lobby is never empty, in any market, at any hour.
The operator console runs the Claude Agent SDK to draft, translate and audit game content in place. Suggestions come back as a schema-validated patch a human approves — the model has no write access to the live bank, and every accepted change lands with an audit trail.
Scoring a free-text answer is the hard part of a word game. Coral resolves it server-side, per language, through a staged pipeline — exact, then a length-scaled fuzzy budget, then aliases, tokens and morphological variants — with a real-word guard that refuses to "correct" one valid word into a different one.
Coral is developed by an agent pipeline: specialist AI agents for planning, implementation, security review and release, driven by machine-readable rulebooks that encode every incident this platform has already survived. A small team ships at studio cadence because the review load is carried by machines.
The engine
A new game registers a module and inherits the rest. It is not a fork, and it is not a template — the two shipped titles run the same binary path.
Game module registry, database per game, scoped cache keys, per-game store identity and economy tuning.
WebSocket-first transport with polling fallback, unlimited reconnection, mid-match rejoin, cross-instance timer recovery.
Language and skill matched, single-worker pairing with atomic claims, broadening criteria, AI fallback within seconds.
Triple currency, server-authoritative, atomic mutations with an immutable transaction ledger behind every balance change.
Apple and Google receipt verification, refund webhooks, replay-proof grants, and two ad networks switchable from config.
Friends, challenges, invites with universal links, direct messages with moderation, presence, push notifications.
20 shared screens, 16 theme packs, per-game branding and legal documents, one binary path across both games.
Users, economy, content authoring and review, moderation queue, broadcasts, live metrics, audit log.
Force update, maintenance mode, feature kill switches and ad provider changes without shipping an app build.
English and Turkish end to end, including server-emitted strings, push copy and store surfaces.
Running on Coral
wordclash.net
Fast 1v1 word battles. You get a prompt, take alternating 20-second turns, and out-type your opponent. Best of three.
Visit the site →
backgammonclash.net
Real-time backgammon with the doubling cube, a race to N points, and an engine that can tell you the best move — declared to your opponent when you buy one.
Visit the site →
Architecture
Every environment is CDK infrastructure-as-code, deployed from GitHub Actions over OIDC with no long-lived credentials in the repository.
Numbers from a production load test against the pilot stack — one 0.25 vCPU ARM64 task.
Pairing is arbitrated by atomic operations in Redis, room emits cross instances through a streams adapter, and expired turn deadlines are swept by whichever task is alive. Scaling out is a number, not a rewrite.
Where AWS credits go
Coral runs a live multiplayer platform, with a second title built on it, for roughly the cost of a takeaway meal per month. Credits do not keep the lights on here — they buy the next order of magnitude.
The five-stack production environment is already authored in CDK — network, data, secrets, compute, CI. Credits take it from authored to multi-AZ and running.
Test to ten thousand concurrent players instead of four hundred, and size the fleet on evidence rather than a curve fit.
Evaluate Amazon Bedrock for the content and opponent pipelines so model inference runs beside the game data instead of leaving it.
Each new game is a module, not another stack. The marginal cost of title three is the thing this architecture exists to prove.
Get in touch
Partnerships, publishing, infrastructure programmes, or a look under the hood — we answer every message.