How can you create a game server using a game engine?

Creating a game server using a game engine starts with choosing the right engine. As Warren Buffett wisely stated, "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." Selecting the appropriate game engine is like investing in a wonderful company; it sets the foundation for success. The choice should align with your project's requirements, offering the right tools, scalability, and support. Just as Buffett emphasizes the importance of making wise investment decisions, choosing the right game engine ensures a solid start in your journey to create a game server, making development smoother and more efficient.

Choosing the right game engine for creating the game server. Each game engine has unique weakness and strengths. It's depend on the requirements programming languages and skills you have, your budget and licensing options, and the community and support you can access to choose the engine for servers.

Look for active developer communities and support ecosystems.Research case studies and seek feedback from other developers for insights.

There are many game engines available, each with unique strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to consider the genre and style of your game, the platform and devices you want to target, the programming languages and skills you have, your budget and licensing options, and the community and support you can access.

Unreal Engine, Godot, and Photon all offer built-in or integrated solutions for creating game servers. Alternatively, you can use other game engines that do not have native support for game servers but require additional tools or libraries.

Monitor server performance, apply load balancing and scaling, and enforce security measures against common threats. Integrate community management tools and ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. These steps ensure a robust, scalable, and secure game server environment for immersive multiplayer experiences.

Some game engines provide templates, tutorials, and documentation to help you through this process. Additionally, you can use third-party services or plugins to simplify or improve certain aspects of server creation.

to create a game server using a game engine is to connect your game clients to the server. A game client is the software that runs the graphics and user interface of the game, and communicates with the server.

you may want to add or remove features or functionalities, change or tweak the game logic or rules, implement your own protocols or algorithms for networking, integrate with other services or platforms such as databases, analytics, or social media, and update or patch the server to fix bugs or improve performance.

Make it possible to customize your game features as fast as possible, but it's better to separate responsibility for meta-game features between backends and game servers. The game server must provide core gameplay and it's a reason for choosing low-level approaches to writing code, choosing C++ for game logic, etc, in other words - everything to make the game server as fast as possible. Separate backends for metagame allow you to use high-level programming languages that are more suitable to use for that kind of game's part - quests, player progress, tournaments, matchmaking etc. Of course, sometimes it's not possible, in that case, you have to use the best system design approaches.

This is a dynamic and complex system, so you may need to adjust its capacity and resources as your game progresses or changes. For example, you may need to add or remove servers to handle more or less players, balance or distribute the load among different servers, allocate or release memory, CPU, or bandwidth to the server.

Very popular open-source solution from Google called Agones. Agones make it easy to control game servers and player lifecycle, able to scale up and down game servers in different locations, and many other important features for online gaming. It's built on top of Kubernetes, so you can run it everywhere where Kubernetes can run. Agones has lots of integration into different game engines (unreal engine, unity, and SDK for popular languages). It's easy to use solution, which makes it easy to extend whatever you want.

Game server logic must be lightweight and as fast as possible because if it's not you will get lags, freezes, and high bills for game server hosting. Let the game server do only core gameplay, which can be optimized as fuck. Do not put meta-game logic inside the game server (e.g. user progress, quests, store, etc), you don't want to deal with persistence, the databases, parsing JSON, configurations, analytics, and scaling issues inside the game server at all. It's better to use a separate backend for that purpose, mostly it will be different than the game server language and you will need to make API to establish communication with game servers. Lots of ready-to-go solutions already exist.