Posted On: Sep 20, 2021
Today, we are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the Amazon GameLift Plug-in for Unity, making it easier to access GameLift resources and integrate GameLift into your Unity game. Trusted by some of the most successful game companies in the world like Ubisoft and Gungho, GameLift deploys, operates, and scales dedicated servers for multiplayer games. With this update, game developers can use the GameLift Plug-in for Unity to access GameLift APIs and deploy AWS CloudFormation templates for common gaming scenarios.
To ease game development, a majority of game developers utilize a game engine, with Unity as a popular choice. The GameLift Plug-in for Unity provides everything a Unity developer needs to access GameLift to deploy and scale game servers. After downloading and installing the plug-in package from the GitHub repo/download page into the Unity development environment, developers can use the plug-in UI to configure settings, perform local testing of builds of their game server, and import and run a sample Unity game. The GameLift Plug-in for Unity also includes five pre-built CloudFormation template sample scenarios that developers can customize for their game, making it easier to integrate GameLift without having to be an AWS expert.
Benefits of using the GameLift Plug-in for Unity:
- Make it easier to use GameLift. The GameLift Plug-in for Unity provides a simple download and installation experience and includes native Unity UIs and workflows that make it easy for Unity developers to get started using GameLift.
- Reduce the amount of development effort and time. The GameLift Plug-in for Unity comes with the tools for preparing Unity games to run on the GameLift service, including libraries needed to access GameLift APIs. It circumvents the need for developers to download the GameLift Server SDK in source code form and manually build the C# libraries.
- Help developers learn how to use GameLift and access its features. The included CloudFormation templates allow developers to build a game server backend using other AWS services with UI-level integrations in the Unity Editor. The GameLift Plug-in for Unity also includes a sample game developers can use to explore the basics of integrating their game with Amazon GameLift.
As a reminder, GameLift is available in 22 public regions: US East (Ohio and N. Virginia), US West (N. California and Oregon), Africa (Cape Town), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Milan, Paris, and Stockholm), Middle East (Bahrain), South America (São Paulo), China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet, and China (Ningxia), operated by NWCD.
To learn more, read our blog, check out the GameLift release notes or dive into the GameLift product page.