Hello! I have several questions regarding PlayFab (PF later in text) services and what do I want archieve with them.
This is a study project, my goal is to explore how big games are done with lots of social interactions, serverside logic, async multiplayer (probably some sync too), market, etc.
I want to pair PF with custom serverside logic written in c# using .net core and to understand how to scale it with azure services available.
Here are things that I want to archive during this study project:
Custom server
Custom api server written in c#. Reason: I want to implement a lot of gamelogic concerning things like crafting, opening chests, generating rewards for players etc. on the server. For security reasons, because it seems like best practice not to let clients decide on those things.
I want to integrate this server with several PF services:
- Authentication. Player connects to the api server with a login request, I forward it to PF, then return the result to the player.
- Social features. Friends, clans, archievents, leaderboards, etc. Workflow is the same I believe.
- Player economy to leverage existing PF features.
- Analytics. It probably will be sent directly from clients, because no use of an additional middle man that just passes data to PF. But maybe I will send some data from the server, too (e.g. sending match/battle results).
- Cloud database. Don’t know if I really need it, probably existing PF services will suffice, but still a nice thing to consider.
The questions are:
- Is my approach reasonable at all? I know that a lot of mentioned thing can be accomplished with Cloud Scripts that are already integrated with PF, but I want that logic to be written in c# to further enhance my skills/knowledge with that language (remember, this is the study project).
- If this approach is ok, how to deploy and scale this kind of server? This is probably the wrong question to ask in the PF forum, because it's a more “general hosting question” type. AFAIK, I will just use Azure hosting services to both deploy, scale, balance to loads and etc. Am I right?
Multiplayer
I want to explore both async (and later sync) multiplayer features. Game server again written in c#, deployed and scaled by PF multiplayer services. I believe the logic is pretty much the same: I request a game server from my api server, PF performs matchmaking, spins up the game server (doesn’t matter sync/async multiplayer). Then some request goes to api server to notify that match is over, game server instance goes down, some rewards are distributed to players, etc.
Is this the right way to do that kind of things?