From Peer-to-Peer to Fair Fights: Bloody Bastards on Dedicated Servers
Written in collaboration with
Tibith Games
Key Highlights
Bloody Bastards is a mobile fighting game, and moving its multiplayer from a peer-to-peer model to a headless, authoritative dedicated server made it fair and spoof-free. In the studio's own words, no hacker has been able to cheat since version 5.0.0. When one client used to be trusted with match results, those results could be faked. Now the server owns the truth.
Players no longer pick a server region before they can play. Edgegap's matchmaker groups players by ping and deploys a dedicated server closest to them, so anyone in the world can tap one button and get a fair match. The region selector is gone from the flow entirely.
Syncing physics across a peer-to-peer match is notoriously hard, and the previous model left players fighting through desyncs and wildly uneven latency. Now the authoritative server runs the simulation and clients only render the result, which removes the desync problem at its root and levels the ping field.
Tibith tunes match-by-ping expansions and rank tiers directly in production, with no redeploy and a near-instant restart. For a studio operating a 10M-download hit, that means iterating on matchmaking like a live service without requiring a backend team behind it.
The Studio
Tibith Ltd is a UK-based game studio led by director Tibi Tircomnicu, and its flagship title is Bloody Bastards.
That game is a physics-based medieval fighting game where you battle your bastard brothers in the arena of champions. It blends pixel art, 2D physics, and ragdoll mechanics into a fighting experience that plays like nothing else: tap and hold on either side of the screen to control each hand, double-tap to move, and mix hundreds of weapons, shields, and gear into thousands of lethal combinations. Daggers, axes, swords, maces, hammers. There can be only one.
Players agree. Bloody Bastards has passed 10 million downloads on Google Play alone, carrying a 4.6-star rating across more than 403,000 reviews, plus a 4.8-star rating from 45,000 ratings on the web app store. This is a genuine mobile hit.
The Challenge
Before version 5.0.0, Bloody Bastards ran on a peer-to-peer model. That worked to get multiplayer off the ground, but as the game grew, the cracks in P2P turned into real problems for players and for the studio.
Cheating was rampant. With no authoritative server, one client, the host, had to be trusted with match results. As Tibi describes it, results “could be spoofed on that client and cheats were rampant in multiplayer.” In a competitive fighting game, that is the fastest way to lose the players who care most.
Matches desynced. In the studio's words, the “desync issues” traced straight back to the pre-5.0.0 “peer-to-peer topology.” Keeping a physics simulation in sync across peers is one of the hardest problems in multiplayer networking, and P2P made Tibith fight it on every match.
Ping was wildly uneven. Tibi points to a “massive difference in players' ping.” Without a neutral server between players, matches routinely paired people with very different latency, so one player's smooth fight was another's laggy mess.
Players had to pick a region. Multiplayer required players to choose their own server region before they could play together. As Tibi lists it among the problems: “players having to choose their own server region in order to play against each other in the same region.”
The Solution
Edgegap addressed the migration across three fronts, in the order a player experiences them.
Matchmaking
The previous flow asked players to choose a server region before they could be grouped with others nearby. Edgegap's matchmaker removes that step, grouping players by ping and handing the match to a dedicated server deployed closest to them. As Tibi puts it, not needing a player-chosen region in the flow is “amazing,” because players can now “[...] just hit the Fight button and play against anyone in the world.”
The matchmaker is also where Tibith runs the closest thing to live-ops. Because it is fully managed and configurable, matchmaking rules can be tuned in production without redeploying the game, and the matchmaker restarts fast enough to iterate in real time. Matching by ping, adjusting expansion timings, reshaping rank tiers: all of it happens directly in production.
“The Matchmaker provided by Edgegap is amazing, especially since I can match by ping and also tweak it without needing to redeploy anything, and it restarts very fast. It's like mini live-ops. I love tweaking expansions and rank tiers directly in production.” - Tibi Tircomnicu, Director, Tibith Ltd
Integration and Production Pipeline
All of this had to be integrated and operated by the studio itself. Tibith runs the full Edgegap stack inside Unity, and the integration stayed out of the way of building the game. Getting a server build from the editor into production is smooth enough that the pipeline never becomes the project.
“The whole process of integrating and running the Edgegap stack in Unity is extremely seamless and friction-free. As a solo dev, this is amazing.” - Tibi Tircomnicu
Server-Authoritative Dedicated Servers
This is the change that fixed the game. Peer-to-peer put the match on the players' devices and trusted one of them, the host, with the outcome. Edgegap hosts a headless, authoritative dedicated server instead, so the server runs the physics simulation and clients only render what it reports.
That single shift resolves the two problems Tibith cared about most. Because the server is authoritative, match results can no longer be faked on a client, and the cheating that spread through the peer-to-peer version stops at the door. Because one server runs the physics for everyone in the match, the desync that plagued P2P disappears. The result is a competitive fighting game that is finally fair by design, not by patch.
“Hosting an authoritative headless server makes the game fair and spoof-free, FINALLY, haha. Literally no hackers have been able to cheat since version 5.0.0. Syncing physics in multiplayer games is notoriously hard, but having an authoritative server run the simulation while clients only render the result has always been the best approach.” - Tibi Tircomnicu
Dedicated servers also sidestep a problem that is specific to mobile. Direct peer-to-peer connections are fragile on cellular networks, where carrier-grade NAT commonly blocks the inbound connections that P2P depends on (carrier-grade NAT prevents the port forwarding and direct connections these applications need). Routing every match through a hosted dedicated server removes that whole class of connectivity failures for players on mobile data.
There is a cost dimension here that favors mobile titles in general. A fast, session-based mobile match rarely needs a full CPU core, and Edgegap's fractional vCPU sizing lets studios run smaller, right-sized dedicated servers rather than paying for capacity that sits idle. For high-volume mobile games, sizing the server to the match is what keeps authoritative, dedicated hosting economical at scale.
Conclusion
Bloody Bastards is a 10-million-download mobile hit, and since version 5.0.0 it is also provably fair. The migration from peer-to-peer to Edgegap's dedicated servers made every match server-authoritative, ending the cheating and desync that P2P had baked in. Edgegap's matchmaking put players one tap away from a fair fight against anyone in the world, no region picking required.
That is what modern multiplayer infrastructure is supposed to do: run authoritative dedicated servers and production matchmaking for a game played by millions, get out of the way, and let the game win.
