Addressing Performance Challenges in Real-Time Gaming
As a software developer and IoT enthusiast, Lino Moises Mediavilla Ponce set out to create a unique gaming experience with The Predictive Maintenance Game—an interactive game that educates users on monitoring the health of machinery in real-time. Initially, he developed the game as a minimum viable product (MVP) that relied on polling the server at regular intervals to update the machine’s status. However, when testing on a mobile network, Lino found that this approach severely impacted performance, leading to sluggish and unresponsive gameplay.
Realizing he needed a more efficient way to deliver real-time updates, he turned to MQTT, a lightweight protocol optimized for fast, low-bandwidth communication. With a desire for reliability and security, Lino decided to leverage HiveMQ for the project, which he saw as a foundational piece of his portfolio.
Robust Zero-Cost Brokers Power Solution
Lino adopted HiveMQ Cloud for production and HiveMQ Community Edition for local development. By integrating HiveMQ, he transformed the game’s architecture, moving from a traditional polling model to an MQTT, pub/sub based model that enables seamless, real-time communication. This new setup allows players to monitor the state of their machines through interactive charts that refresh in near real-time as the game progresses.
Thanks to HiveMQ’s robust messaging capabilities, the game can handle around 300 simultaneous players, each sending 22 MQTT messages per second with payloads of 330 bytes. HiveMQ's web client dashboard proved invaluable during development, simplifying debugging both locally and in production. The community edition enabled Lino to work seamlessly between his local development environment and production, allowing him to deploy quickly and test new features.
Achieving Smooth Gameplay and Scalability
The shift to MQTT with HiveMQ has enabled Lino’s game to perform smoothly, even on mobile networks. This improved performance enhances the user experience by delivering timely updates and reducing latency. The game, which is likely the first of its kind focused on predictive maintenance, showcases HiveMQ’s ability to support interactive, real-time applications in a lean, efficient way.
Through his innovative use of HiveMQ, Lino has created an educational and engaging game that highlights the importance of predictive maintenance—a topic he’s passionate about and eager to bring to a broader audience. His project serves as a testament to how even the free, community versions of HiveMQ can empower individual developers and small teams to build reliable, scalable solutions with a professional-grade MQTT infrastructure.
For more information on Lino’s game, visit The Predictive Maintenance Game and explore the code on GitHub.
