Freeze Tag Duels

Freeze tag, relay freeze, and Spleef, with multiple matches running simultaneously in different areas of the same server. About 25,800 lines across 180 files and 18 server systems. It has real players on it.

Adding a game mode without touching the match system

Modes are registered in one place and driven by a small per-area driver. Adding a new mode means one new driver and one registry line — the code that runs matches is not touched at all. That is what makes several different modes running side by side sane rather than a tangle of special cases.

The match rules themselves are pure logic, separated from anything game-engine-specific, so they can be tested from the command line without launching the game.

The audit

An audit turned up 129 issues. I fixed and merged all of them in one night by running eleven agents in parallel, each in its own isolated copy of the repository, then cleaned out the dead code behind them. Every critical and high-priority finding was closed.

Hardening for real players

• Purchases can never be double-credited. A ledger of recent purchase IDs is kept in the player's own save data, and anything unrecognized is deferred rather than granted.
• Every message the client can send is rate-limited.
• Leaving mid-match still records the result — the loss is written straight to saved data even after the player's live session is gone.

Because it is live, its saved-data namespace is effectively frozen: renaming it would orphan every existing player's progress.