Implementation of Backend Infrastructure for Social Mobile Game
Sillanpää, Ville (2015)
Metropolia Ammattikorkeakoulu
2015
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201505148066
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-201505148066
Tiivistelmä
The goal of this thesis was to create a scalable backend infrastructure for a social mobile game, Last Planets, deployed in the Microsoft Azure cloud environment. The main part of the study consists of three sections: the first one describes the needs and considerations for communication middleware, the second one goes through the design principles and typical components in a game server architecture, and the third one explains how the aforementioned theory is put in practice in Last Planets.
As a result of the research, Photon, a networking technology developed by ExitGames, has been chosen to perform the role of a networking middleware, for reasons such as having a comprehensive set of features, good documentation and support, ease of use, and compatibility with all major mobile platforms. Furthermore, server architecture-designed to be scalable, responsive, fault tolerant, and well monitored-has been implemented on top of Photon.
The knowledge gathered in this study can be used as a guideline or reference when developing a backend infrastructure for a social game. Building a backend infrastructure can be a complicated task-depending on the requirements for the particular game-and this thesis was written to present a solid foundation to build upon. However, some major areas such as security and issues related to running game logic on the server-side have been purposefully left out of the study.
As a result of the research, Photon, a networking technology developed by ExitGames, has been chosen to perform the role of a networking middleware, for reasons such as having a comprehensive set of features, good documentation and support, ease of use, and compatibility with all major mobile platforms. Furthermore, server architecture-designed to be scalable, responsive, fault tolerant, and well monitored-has been implemented on top of Photon.
The knowledge gathered in this study can be used as a guideline or reference when developing a backend infrastructure for a social game. Building a backend infrastructure can be a complicated task-depending on the requirements for the particular game-and this thesis was written to present a solid foundation to build upon. However, some major areas such as security and issues related to running game logic on the server-side have been purposefully left out of the study.