Deploy overview
What is needed for a player to play a game? Their favourite gaming device and an access to that game in a form of a disc or a digital copy.
To help you reach as vast players community as possible, Elympics created PlayPad, allowing for cross-play on desktop, mobile and even Telegram with only one game build provided, in an easily accesible form of a web link. It also lets us engage players in exploring games made on Elympics through player's Cockpit and our Telegram bot, boosting your game's range even further.
PlayPad also enhances your game experience by unlocking Web3 potential and providing true competitive experience of playing for high stakes with bets and tournaments, being an excellent monetization model.
So you reached the players with your game, but how do you ensure that they do not tinker with it a bit and provide cheated match results? For that stands server authoritative architecture and the server overseeing the match.
From the above we conclude that there are two types of builds needed to be uploaded:
Server builds
Server builds are created by the Elympics SDK. These builds only have the Gameplay scene and will run on our servers with minimum graphic settings in order to reduce resource usage. It serves as an authority source independent from the player, ensuring fair match resolutions.
Server builds can be uploaded by going to:
Tools -> Elympics -> Manage games in Elympics -> Upload
You can find more information in this guide.
This will only work if your ElympicsConfig is setup correctly as stated in the installation guide.
Now that you have the server build uploaded, you can change your game's mode to Debug Online Player (and run from the gameplay scene).
You can also start from the lobby scene (doing so ignores selected game mode in the config).
This allows you to play while connected to the online server (no server clone needed), with the results saved in our database (but not showed in the Editor UI - you can provide your own implementations if you want to).
We recommend testing the game with the online server in the Editor a bit further before proceeding to create a client build.
Server runs with 640 x 480 resolution which may be important when handling mouse position inputs.
Client builds
Client builds are WebGL builds of the game that will be used by the players. These builds will include both scenes in the game and are no different from a normal WebGL game build.
Elympics supports Brotli and None compression but we recommend using Brotli.
See how to create & upload client builds .
Make sure to change the name of the files in contents of the "build" folder to one on pair with your versioning convention. (e.g: v0.1 , v0.2, etc.)
If you do not want, you don't need to use PlayPad for hosting your game - you can for example use desktop builds to distribute it. It's not required for server authority features to work properly. But note that this way you miss on easy distribution of PlayPad hosted games and engaging your players in a competitive experience with huge monetization potential.
Additional possibilities
If you seek some unique customization, like adding energy system to your game (like in our Goose Fury game), see what you can create with External Game Backend.
For that, architecture knowledge may also be necessary.
If you want to set up some automatizaion, see our CLI features.
Ensuring quality
With that knowledge, you have all the tools to iterate on your game and ensure its quality, which is mandatory to publish the game in the next step.