DevFight
Fight Your Way to Visibility
- Year
- 2026
- Duration
- Live since August 2026
- Team
- Mahere & David
- Status
- Live
What is DevFight?
DevFight is a turn-based pixel RPG in the browser. Dev teams of one to five players enter their product (website, app, or store listing), open a lobby, and fight through a chain of increasingly hard bosses. Whoever gets furthest earns a spot on the public wall at devfight.app/wall, with the team's pixel avatars next to their product. Product Hunt meets Final Fantasy 1, with roguelite structure: XP, levels, abilities, and drops only exist inside a run, and every run starts at zero.
The problem we set out to solve.
Indie developers beg for upvotes to get visibility. We wanted a launch platform where visibility is earned by playing, and where a five-player realtime battle with simultaneous turn input, a 30-second timer, and auto-battle runs reliably without a dedicated game server.
How we built it.
The whole game runs on Cloudflare. A Hono worker serves the API and the server-rendered wall. Each run is a Durable Object that owns the combat state and the WebSocket connections, each invite code is a Durable Object lobby, and a global Durable Object streams the live-stats feed. D1 stores users, runs, leaderboard, and every rated move for balance work. The engine package (combat, rating, loot, RNG) runs server-side only, so the client cannot cheat. 28 avatars are procedurally generated, sound is synthesized Game-Boy style, and the arena is drawn on a canvas with hit, crit, dodge, and heal effects.
Under the hood.
What we paid attention to.
Fair by Design
Progression is run-scoped. Nobody buys a permanent advantage, matchmaking is trivial, and every run tells its own story.
Visibility You Earn
The wall is server-rendered and shareable. Product images come from og:image or store artwork, and every product gets traffic stats with clicks and conversion rate.
Where we are today.
Phase 1 and 2 of the spec (playable core and multiplayer) are live at devfight.app, including seasons, leaderboard, and a live-stats feed. Replay viewer is next.