From Tizen Failure to 100 Million Drawings: An Indie Developer's Success Story

The author developed the multiplayer drawing game Drawize for a Samsung Tizen OS app contest in late 2016, completing it in just 4 weeks, including a real-time multiplayer engine, but didn’t win an award. After releasing it online in early 2017, the project gradually grew. Now, 8 years later, the database has processed 100 million drawings. Technically, the backend uses .NET and WebSockets for real-time synchronization, the frontend is handwritten HTML/JS, data is stored in PostgreSQL and MongoDB, and Wasabi cloud storage is used to save costs. The author uses an AI content classification model trained in 2021 to filter inappropriate content. On busy days, there are 30,000 active users with approximately 3.16TB of storage. The 100 millionth drawing was a red balloon. This story shows the transformation from a failed project to a successful product, highlighting the indie developer’s efforts in scaling a real-time multiplayer game, handling reconnection edge cases, and content moderation. The author is open to discussing technical details, such as how .NET handles the load and the application of AI in content safety.