Anatomy of a Scala Game Server - Pierre Ricadat | Lambda Days 2025

Pierre Ricadat details the architecture and functional programming techniques used to build a real-time multiplayer game server in Scala.

✨ This talk was recorded at Lambda Days in June 2025. If you're curious about our upcoming event, check lambdadays.org ✨ Anatomy of a Scala Game Server Since 2020, I have been working on a game server for the popular mobile game CookieRun: Kingdom, which serves over a million monthly players. This server is fully developed in Scala using a purely functional programming approach. In early 2024, my team faced the challenge of introducing real-time, multiplayer “mini-games” into our existing game. This required a significant architectural shift. We designed and implemented a new component from scratch, leveraging the lessons we’ve learned over the years and the latest features of Scala. In this talk, I will explore the architecture, application design, and techniques we used to build this new game server. From immutability and software transactional memory to refined types and monadic constructs, I will demonstrate how functional programming principles can be applied to build reliable, maintainable, and high-performance applications in the real world. Let's keep in touch! Follow us on: 💥BlueSky: bsky.app/profile/lambdadays.bsky.social 💥LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/lambda-days 💥Facebook: facebook.com/lambdadays 💥Mastodon: genserver.social/codesync 💥Twitter: twitter.com/LambdaDays