MMORPG Inside a Telegram Chat

The brief outgrew the idea of a bot

The assignment began with a request for a full MMORPG inside a Telegram chat — not a Mini App, and not a website.

Players needed characters, classes, abilities, resources, inventories, quests, and ways to affect one another. Telegram had to remain the only interface.

The key decision was that user_id + chat_id defines a game character. One person can belong to several chats and hold a different class, balance, inventory, and progress in each. Every chat became a self-contained game world.

A game server behind the Telegram interface

One inline-button tap can mean using an ability on another player. In a fraction of a second, the system validates the class, resource, cooldown, target state, defensive effects, and other constraints; it then updates both players, persists durable data, refreshes cache, and schedules a timer or notification when needed.

• Telegram as the client. Messages became game events, inline buttons the interface, and the finite-state machine a sequence of game actions.
• Durable and fast state. PostgreSQL holds the world's long-lived memory. Redis manages cooldowns, temporary effects, cache, and fast-changing state.
• Rules outside the handlers. Game logic lives in dedicated services, keeping Telegram handlers from turning into thousands of lines of branching code.
• Safe player interaction. The system accounts for simultaneous actions, stale buttons, resources expiring mid-action, and inconsistent cached state.

The result

The economy was the hardest part: classes, items, resources, rewards, and quests all affect one another. A mechanic that works perfectly alone can fail where it intersects with another.

The project grew to roughly 15,000 lines of Python and more than 400 tests. The production release included:

• five character classes;
• PvP and abilities;
• inventory, items, and quests;
• resources, cooldowns, and temporary effects;
• an in-game economy;
• notifications;
• a separate world for every chat;
• a web-based admin panel.

The first substantial beta test brought mostly text and gameplay adjustments rather than architectural rewrites. That was the moment the conversation stopped being about a system and became about a game.