Hey there! So I'm designing a multiplayer turn based game similar to Pokemon's battle system (not the RPG) and I've got a few questions about PlayFab after doing some digging.
For starters, I'm creating a game where players draft their teams ahead of time (vaguely similar to a deck builder in card games) and then they queue up for a match against a real opponent. During the match, both players will send commands as server requests, which will then be read back to them in a reordered list as calculated by the server. All of this is in real time. I'm also using the Unity engine and lightly dabbled in both Firebase and Mirror before coming here.
So my first question is in regards to server setup. I've read that PlayFab allows for multiplayer servers. Was this correct? So hypothetically I would be able to create and deploy a server build of my game and have PlayFab do all the hosting and scaling? I literally found the documentation today and prior to that I didn't know that PlayFab offered this because every Unity tutorial video ever coupled PlayFab with Photon Unity Networking (PUN2). My initial plan was to hook up PlayFab with Mirror, but if PlayFab does multiplayer server hosting, what's the point? Am I correct in assuming that I could have dedicated servers do all the calculations and relay that info back to the players during a match without the need for another third party solution?
Second question is in regards to saving player data. I just read that someone else was making a Pokemon game on this forum, so I think the question is answered. Is it possible to save a more complex catalog of basically a Pokemon, type1, type2, stat modifications, ability, and four moves, all as one unit? Because ideally I'd like the user to be able to fetch different teams, with each team consisting of 6 Pokemon with the attributes listed above. So the player would be able to save and retrieve team 1, team 2, etc. Could I do something like that in PlayFab? Seems like the answer is "yes", but I would have to be careful about how I store the data.
Finally, I'd like to incorporate typical multiplayer GaaS type stuff that it seems PlayFabs handles pretty well. Custom matchmaking, player auth, in-game currencies, analytics, all seem very well documented and easy to implement. What about things like daily quests? Any known way to do that or is that solely something that's handled inside of the game client within Unity? Never thought about that one until now.
Anywho, thank you to anyone who put the time into answering this one. I apologize if some of these questions are remedial. I'm not new to multiplayer, but I'm very new to PlayFab!