Building games is complex. It gets even more complicated when games are multiplayer, in which two or more clients are playing against each other at the same time and need to share the state.

The most widespread way to accomplish this synchronization is with thread based programming. However, this requires dealing with low level mechanisms like threads, semaphores and locks, and thus diverts attention from the most important aspect: the game logic.

Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed and resilient message-driven applications, and is part of the Typesafe technology stack. Using Akka for implementing the game logic allows developers to focus on the game’s rules and forget about having to manage threads and locks.

In this talk, you will learn how to extract the Finite State Machine (FSM) hidden behind a game and how this can be easily modeled using Akka FSM actors. Furthermore, it will be shown how important it is to take possible failure scenarios into account when building your game in order to make it more resilient.

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