Interesting approach! I've thought about a similar method after reading about the PLATO platform.

When playing astro‑maze, the delay is noticeable, and in a 2D action game such delays are especially apparent. Games that don’t rely on tight real‑time input might perform better. (I'm connecting from Europe, though.)

If you add support for drawing from images (such as spritesheets or tilesheets) in the future, and the client stores those images and sounds locally, the entire screen could be drawn from these assets, so no pixel data would need to be transferred, only commands like "draw tile 56 at position (x, y)."

(By the way, opening abstra.io in a German-language browser leads to https://www.abstra.io/deundefined which shows a 404 error.)

Yeah.. As people are playing and I'm watching their feedbacks it is becoming clear to me that the main source of input delay comes from the distance to the server.. the whole game is running in a single machine in SFO, so it makes total sense this bad exp in europe

I think this is inevitable unless I add some optimism/interpolation in the client

Also, thanks for the feedback! I will fix the Abstra landing page

try https://www.abstra.io/en instead