Set up for iterative development with Amazon GameLift Anywhere
Amazon GameLift provides tools and solutions to help you set up a hosted test environment for use during game development. With these tools, you can create an environment that mirrors the real-world player experience of managed hosting with Amazon GameLift and supports a rapid, iterative development process.
With a separate test environment, you remove the overhead of an Amazon GameLift managed fleet during testing. You no longer have to upload each new game server build iteration, create a new fleet for it, and then wait 15+ minutes to it to activate. Instead, you can create a new build, quickly update the test fleet with the new build, start it, and commence testing.
Using an Amazon GameLift Anywhere fleet, you can set up a test environment using a local device, such as your development workstation. You can also set up a test environment using a cloud-based hosting resource.
Set up an Anywhere test environment to develop and test a range of scenarios, including these:
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Test your game server integration with the Amazon GameLift server SDK. You can test even without a working game client by using AWS CLI calls to start new game sessions and track game session events.
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Test interactions between your game client, backend service, and the Amazon GameLift service as you develop components for your game. Fine-tune the player experience for joining a game.
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Experiment with your FlexMatch matchmaker design. Try out rule set variations and other matchmaking feature implementations. Set up and test matchmaking backfill.
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Try out other Amazon GameLift hosting features, such as runtime configuration settings (with the Amazon GameLift Agent) for game server life cycle management.
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Quickly build, test, and repeat to validate all aspects of your game's player experience, including multiplayer interactions, in a live, hosted environment.
Later, as you prepare your game for launch, you'll want to add Amazon GameLift managed fleets to fine-tune your hosting configurations and test additional scenarios, including the following:
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Experiment with and test game session queue designs, including use of multi-location fleets, Spot and On-Demand fleets, and multiple instance types.
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Try out game session placement options with managed fleets, including the use of optional latency policies and fleet prioritization settings.
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Configure capacity scaling to meet player demand, using automatic or manual scaling options.
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Set up AWS CloudFormation with Amazon GameLift managed fleets to manage your hosting resources long term.
Fast Build Update Tool (for development only)
With managed EC2 fleets, to deploy a game server build update, you need to upload each new build to Amazon GameLift and create a new fleet for it.
The Fast Build Update Tool lets you can bypass these steps during development, saving you time and allowing for faster development iteration. With this tool, you can quickly update your game build files across all computes in an existing fleet. The tool has several options; you can replace an entire game build or change specific files, and you can manage how to restart game server processes after the updates. You can also use it to update individual computes in a fleet.
To get the Fast Build Update Tool and learn more about how to use it, visit the Amazon GameLift Toolkit repo for
The Fast Build Update Tool
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