What are the features of the game’s backend when it comes to the cloud?
The player will not interact directly with the game’s backend, but the game’s backend is what provides the features for the gamer’s experience. While games vary in their needs, most have three components in common: a gateway that connects to your service, the game service, and the server. The game’s backend often provides features such as:
- Features of the game
- User authentication
- Player Achievements
- Economic activities in the game
- Charts
Benefits of cloud-based game backends
Bringing games to the cloud offers many benefits such as easy load balancing, flexibility, and security. This also helps in fraud prevention and for a stable user experience.
Improved load balancing
The backend can support load balancing by adjusting to the request.
Improve flexibility
The backend improves flexibility and allows you to design and develop new features for the game at the same time.
Improved security
Security areas to consider when developing a game include player account information and financial payment details. Implement safety controls in your game backend.
Provide a consistent experience
Provide a more consistent and reliable experience that increases player loyalty and retention.
**Prevent fraud**
The backend can help prevent fraud. You can design components to detect and prevent fraudsters.
The Challenge of the Game Backend
If the backend has been configured as a monolithic application that handles all the game logic, this can make it difficult to maintain, update new features, and deploy. Another common challenge is the need for a backend to efficiently handle traffic fluctuations.
From monolithic to microservices
You can use the microservices approach with your backend architecture for services and components that fulfill different functions. Each use case your backend addresses can leverage the best technology for the job. They can scale independently of each other as needed. And they are much easier to maintain because the codebase is much smaller.
Fluctuations in information transmission
Even for games that don’t always have high traffic, traffic can fluctuate and the backend must be able to adjust accordingly to accommodate this. By hosting your game backend in the cloud, you can use AWS services that provide scalability. This saves you from manual effort and provides a better game experience for your players.
User authentication
The authentication service validates the player’s identity as they play the game. This usually happens by logging them into the developer’s own authentication system or a third-party identity provider. Once a player has been authenticated, future requests they make through their game client will be able to pinpoint whose game state and data needs updating.
Using Amazon Cognito, you can quickly add user registration, sign in, and control access to your games. It scales to millions of users and supports logins with various social identity providers and corporate identity providers.
Player Achievements
Achievements are a great tool to keep your players engaged with the game. As the player progresses in the game, an achievement system can be used to track milestones and achievements. For example, players can earn achievements for actions like getting a new high score, passing certain levels, logging into the game for a certain number of days, etc.
Developers can use the Amazon API Gateway service to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs of any size.
Using API Gateway, you can create RESTful APIs and WebSocket APIs that support real-time two-way communication applications. The API Gateway supports container and serverless workloads other than web applications.
Economic activities in the game
Your in-game economy will be closely linked to its reward structure. Depending on your game, players can receive and spend virtual currency, real money, or a combination of both. Additionally, your game may include multiple forms of in-game currency, which can make the game more enjoyable and engaging for players.
Using AWS Lambda services, you can run code without provisioning or managing servers.
When you use Lambda, you only pay for the computation time you use. Fees only apply while your code is running. You can also run code for almost any type of backend application or service, all with no need for administration.
Match
In multiplayer games, a matchmaking system is used to bring players together in matches. Depending on the specs of your game, players can be paired up or into larger teams. When you’re designing your game’s backend, consider how players should be connected, in addition to any other logic that needs to be included in the matchmaking process.
Amazon GameLift FlexMatch is a customizable matchmaking service for multiplayer games. With Flexmatch, you can build a custom set of rules to define the look and feel of a multiplayer match for your game, and determine how to evaluate and select compatible players for each match. You can also customize key aspects of the matchmaking process, including tweaking the matching algorithm to suit your game.
Charts
As players progress in your game, leaderboards can be used to display their achievements. Depending on your game, players can compare their scores with their friends’ scores or with all players around the world. Leaderboards can increase player engagement and retention, especially for players who are attracted to competition.
Amazon ElastiCache is a caching service that you can use to accelerate the performance of your applications and databases.
ElastiCache can also be used as the primary data store for use cases such as session storage, game leaderboards, streaming, and analytics. It is compatible with Redis and Memcached.
Player Profile
The player profile is the primary identity your players will carry throughout the game. It may include details like avatars, personal information, user preferences, etc. Player profiles can also help promote a sense of connection and community in your game.
Amazon DynamoDB is a serverless, key-value NoSQL database.
It is designed to run high-performance applications of any size. Its features include built-in security, continuous backup, and automatic multi-zone replication.
DynamoDB is serverless, meaning you don’t need to provision, patch, or manage servers. You also do not need to install, maintain or operate the software.
Streamline the implementation of multiple game components
In some cases, you may need to maintain several environments for each game application while managing scalability. When you are designing your game’s backend, you should consider whether it is beneficial to implement a solution that can streamline the deployment and scaling of multiple game components. or not.
You can use the AWS Elastic Beanstalk service to deploy and scale web applications and services. It is compatible with Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, and Docker, in addition to familiar servers like Apache, Nginx, Pascal, and Internet Information Services (IIS).
After uploading your code, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. You still have full control over the AWS resources that power your application and can access the underlying resources at any time.
AWS Game Analytics Pipeline Solution
By using a serverless solution, game developers can focus on gathering insights instead of spending time managing infrastructure. The solution is IaC, which makes deployment quick. Once deployed, you can import and permanently store data at scale. It also offers the flexibility to choose any analysis tool you want.
The solution has four main parts:
- Import: The first part imports game data from your data producer, including game clients, game servers, and other apps and support services.
- Storage: Next, the streaming data is imported into Amazon S3 for data lake integration and interactive analytics.
- Processing and Analytics: Then, using streaming analytics, you can process events in real time and generate metrics for your game. Your team or game developers can analyze metrics data in CloudWatch and raw events in Amazon S3.
- Visualization: Finally, the dashboard is used to visualize it.
Five pillars of surveillance and visibility
There are five main pillars that can help you understand different aspects of surveillance and visibility. These pillars are:
| Metrics | Logs | Visualization | Alerts | Tracing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metrics are numeric data measured at various time intervals, such as request rate, error rate, duration, and CPU. | Logs are timestamed records of discrete events in your game, such as a failure, an error, or a state transformation. | Visualization is the process of converting metrics to a visual format for fast, intuitive interpretation, like dashboards. | Monitoring systems observe metrics with thresholds and can send alerts if metrics fall outside expected bounds. | Tracing is the act of following a single request end to end throughout your game composed of multiple microservices. |
| Use CloudWatch. | Use Amazon CloudWatch Logs. | Use CloudWatch dashboards. | Use CloudWatch alarms. | Use AWS X-Ray. |
Manage your game infrastructure costs
There are three main tools in the dashboard to manage your game infrastructure costs.
| AWS Cost Explorer | AWS Cost and Usage Report | AWS Budgets |
|---|---|---|
| Use the AWS Cost Explorer tool to visualize your cost drivers and usage trends for your game’s infrastructure. You can explore your usage and costs using visual graphs or reports. You can view your game’s cost data for up to the last 12 months and forecast how much you might spend in the next 12 months. | The AWS Cost and Usage Report (AWS CUR) cost tool contains the most comprehensive set of cost and usage reports available. You can receive reports that break down your game costs by hour, day, or month, service, or tags you define. You can also customize your reports, deliver them to an S3 bucket, and update them up to 3 times a day. | You can use the AWS Budgets tool to turn on simple or complex usage tracking. You can create a cost budget to plan how much you want to use a particular service. You can set up notifications for when you hit a certain amount or ever perform an action. |
End
So I gave the most summary and overview of how AWS deploys to games. I hope to be able to provide you with some knowledge
The article uses google translate in some parts because I’m lazy, so there are some confused sentences. Hope for your understanding.
Bonus photo of my Credly
