Gameye Roundup: Three articles to nail your server hosting

Welcome to the Gameye Newsletter. Here we aim to share our top tips and advice on everything orchestration, infrastructure, and server hosting.

To kick off our first edition, we want to share with your three articles to get you started. After that, you can expect to find monthly updates from our crew.

Let's dig in.

1. How to build your own matchmaker: Advice from Doborog

At some point, you’ll probably want a matchmaker for your multiplayer game. It’s a critical part of making sure that your players can actually join a match. There are plenty of matchmakers out there, like PlayFab and FlexMatch. But there’s no reason you can’t make your own.

In fact, Brian Jordan, co-founder and CTO at Doborog, did just that. They had a short deadline and very specific requirements, so they decided to bite the bullet and create their own. Find out how they did it on PreMortem Games.

2. The war on lag starts with latency

You load up your favourite game, ready to splat some aliens or hide in a cupboard for thirty minutes, only to find that your player keeps mysteriously teleporting around the map. One moment you’re stuck in a wall, the next you’re hovering fifty feet over a chasm. You try to blast the enemies charging towards you, but your bullets seem to only strike air.

Sadly, these aren’t magical abilities. It’s lag. And it can ruin the gameplay and experience for the player. Bullets don’t register. Characters keep jittering all over the place. And your players get more and more frustrated.

The culprit? Lag. More specifically, bad latency. But what exactly is latency? Why does it matter so much? And what can you do to improve it? Find out here.

3. How to host your game: peer-to-peer or client servers?

When hosting your game, you’ve got two main choices: you either leave it up to the players’ machine (peer-to-peer) or you have a separate server (client-server).

But which should you choose for your game? It’s a tough question, because the answer really depends on your genre, how integral to your game the multiplayer is, and whether you need a fair match. Here’s our guide to help you decide.

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?That's all for now. If there's anything in particular you'd like to learn about, let us know. And if you are heading to Cologne this year, make sure to say hello. We'd love to catch up. Until next time ??