Will the website be hosted and served from the same servers as the game, or will they just access the same back-end database?asked by The Jabberwock
TL;DRThe website and back-end services are being tightly integrated through a fast, bi-directional, stateful link, so purchases like ships can be registered immediately and web features can trigger game-side events and function calls directly.
The website and the back-end services are about to have a very close relationship. Prior to this, it's always been us, the services, and platform. But we're now coming together so the services will look at them as another service and they'll look at us as part of their own system. So we're getting married.
We're using RESTful APIs right now, which work over the internet, but we're co-located now, with a dedicated channel, so we get bi-directional communication.
Yeah, we'll have a set of services that have stateful high-speed communication mechanisms to the platform, and we've been working with them on how to architect both sides to make that as streamlined as possible. And I'll use an example right now. When you buy an entitlement, you purchase a ship on the website, there's no way for the platform to tell us that you purchased a ship. So when you log in, we grab your package, which contains all the ships that you purchased and so on. And then we know about it, and then we can create the actual in-game items and persist them. But with this new high-speed communication system, the moment you buy a ship, they will notify us. We can expand the ship immediately and have it ready for you by the time you log in to the game.
When it comes to community-based features like statistics and achievements and things like that, a lot of those features really are best implemented with a web-based technology. If we have a direct line of communication, we can just trigger those things immediately.
And we'll be able to call functions from them directly as a service and so on. And there's an API we provide for them as well so they can request any data from us. We can generate events back and forth to each other.
It's one of the things that's so awesome about working with a partner like Turbulent.
Those guys are really good. They're awesome.
It's the first time I got on a project where the website was done before the game itself.
Yes. We all think about solving the problems in the same way, so it's a very good match.