I have a big project. Like brawl stars. I am planning to use defold while doing this. But I couldn’t decide which back end technology to use.
I have the following;
Playfab
Colyseus
Nakama
Player io (js)
Photon (js)
improbable (c ++)
Among these;
playfabs docs are old and from the plan provided when starting up.(free plan)
I did not understand much.
In colyseus no live ops etc.
nakama too expensive (at least I need a free plan to get started.)
There are no tutorials in Playerio either. But the pricing suits me.
Photon is also expensive and I will have a hard time as it has no built-in support for defold.
I’m not sure about the improbable.
Please help me! (if you have alternative for me, you can say that)
I have the following concerns about Colyseus; Leaderboard can be difficult to make I cannot track user accounts. (like gold diamond level) I don’t know if there is user account interaction with in-app purchases. Besides that, live operations are really important to me. In an update to the game, the user can be updated without doing anything. I cannot give up on this.
I think these might be problems that aren’t intended within Colyseus’ functionality.
I use a Redis database for Leaderboard and account tracking, the player’s information needs to be passed from the device to the server (I use a cookie to do so).
Live updates are possible through Defold, although I have no experience with them. @britzl, @SkaterDad or @Mathias_Westerdahl might be able to advice on ways to do this if you provide more details?
There is also NoobHub. It is super basic with a publish/subscribe pattern for channels and message broadcast. Nothing more. And it has a Defold client implementation.
Nakama itself is free and open source. You can run a local server while developing or set up a server at Amazon, DigitalOcean or some other cloud provider for only a few dollars a month. The cost you saw is for the hosted version of Nakama, called Heroic Cloud. You don’t have to use it.
Nakama is really good, has good support and is free. I was also initially confused by the Nakama pricing, it basically boils down to this:
If you use your own server, it’s free.
If you want Heroic Labs to manage and host the backend, there is a cost.
I’ve started working on a real-time multiplayer game and so far creating the client and server code has been straightforward. The server code can be Lua modules, which simplifies things.
I cited Playerio as an example. The answer to your question is in the ‘playerinsight’ part in my picture. I mean, like in playerio, is there in nakama?
I mean by user tracking:
PlayerInsight
Built-in analysis for player behavior
State-of-the-art analytics and business intelligence built into PlayerIO.
Automatic tracking of key indicators such as ARPU, DAU, MAU, Session Time and more among segments defined automatically or by you.
With PlayerInsight, you’ll never wonder what’s going on in your game again.
Understand your players
Special Segmentation
Income Tracking
Industry standard KPIs: DAU, MAU, APRU and more.
If you check the Nakama product page there is no mention of any advanced analytics, so I believe the answer is No, there is no analytics service in Nakama. You can use something like GameAnalytics for that.
It looks like the events are collected in the server and then it’s up to you to either send them to an analytics services or write your own scripts to analyse the data. There is nothing built into Nakama besides the event gathering mechanism.
