Explore with the Amazon GameLift plugin - Amazon GameLift
Plugin workflow

Explore with the Amazon GameLift plugin

The Amazon GameLift plugin is a full-featured add-on to your Unreal or Unity game engine. It guides you through the basic steps to get your game ready for hosting with the Amazon GameLift. With the plugin's tool set and workflows, you can work within your game engine development environment to prepare your game server for hosting, set up hosting on a local machine for testing, create a simple backend service, and deploy your game server to Amazon GameLift managed cloud-based hosting.

Use the plugin to experience working with Amazon GameLift and get a game hosting solution up and running fast. You can work with sample game assets or your own game project. The plugin automates a number of steps so that you can build a simple working solution. When you complete the plugin's guided workflows, you'll be able to connect a game client to live hosted game sessions through Amazon GameLift.

After using the plugin to create a basic hosting solution, you can then modify and customize the solution to meet the needs of your game.

The plugin is available for the following game engines:

  • Unreal Engine

  • Unity

The plugin includes these components for each game engine:

  • Plugin modules for the game engine editor. When the plugin is installed, a new main menu button gives you access to Amazon GameLift functionality.

  • Libraries for the Amazon GameLift service API with client-side functionality.

  • Libraries for the Amazon GameLift server SDK (version 5).

  • Sample assets for use with testing a server integration.

  • Editable configurations, in the form of AWS CloudFormation templates, that define your game server solution.

Topics

Plugin workflow

The following steps describe a typical path to preparing and deploying your game project on Amazon GameLift. You complete these steps by working in the game engine editor and your game code.

  1. Create a user profile that links to your AWS account user and provides access credentials with permissions to use Amazon GameLift.

  2. Set up related AWS resources that the plugin uses in the hosting solution (referred to as "bootstrapping").

  3. Add server code to your project to establish communication between a running game server and the Amazon GameLift service.

  4. Add client code to your project that lets game clients send requests to Amazon GameLift to start new game sessions and then connect to them.

  5. Use the Anywhere workflow to set up your local workstation as an Anywhere compute and host your game server. Launch your game server and client locally through the plugin, connect to a game session, and test the integration.

  6. Use the Managed EC2 workflow to upload your game server to Amazon GameLift and deploy a simple but complete cloud hosting solution. Launch your game client locally through the plugin, request a game session and connect to it, and play your game.

When working in the plugin, you'll create and use AWS resources, These actions might incur charges to the AWS account in use. If you're new to AWS, these actions might be covered under the AWS Free Tier.