AWS for Games Blog
Now in preview – Amazon GameSparks
Amazon GameSparks is a managed service that provides game developers features for building, running, and scaling the backend of their games. Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Amazon GameSparks into preview, with the SDK for Unity game engine now available to download from the Amazon GameSparks website.
At last year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC), AWS pre-announced Amazon GameSparks as the newest addition to the AWS Game Tech portfolio. Since that time, the Amazon GameSparks team has worked closely with the game developer community to iterate and refine the service features. This new AWS service is purpose-built for games and is powered by AWS core services. This allows Amazon GameSparks to offer industry leading security, unmatched reliability, continuous technological improvements, and integrations with other AWS services.
Game developers have told us they want to spend less time on building and scaling backend services, and more time delivering the best player experience possible. Building and scaling backend features requires expertise with low level cloud infrastructure such as compute, storage, and networking to reach players globally and scale to millions of players. This work typically takes months of effort from dedicated teams, with testing and tuning backend features alone can slow down game development.
Amazon GameSparks addresses these challenges with a serverless game backend that makes it easy for developers to create, test, and tune custom game features without making design compromises or thinking about underlying servers or infrastructure. Amazon GameSparks makes building a game backend easy for game developers who have little to no cloud experience since it comes with out-of-the-box backend features that require minimal setup and is pre-integrated with the Unity game engine.
The preview is launching with the most-requested features from the community and will support mobile (iOS and Android) and PC gaming platforms. Examples of select features and benefits include:
- Cloud Code: Add custom logic, integrate with other AWS services, and extend pre-built game features
- Test Harness: Verify Cloud Code logic from within the console in seconds, to quickly iterate on game design
- Auth/Identity: Integrate with guest auth giving an anonymous identity (guest) access to game backend features
- Managed player storage: An integrated data store to store and retrieve persistent player data
- Messaging: Send messages and events between game clients and Amazon GameSparks over WebSocket connections
- Integration with AWS Lambda: Invoke AWS Lambda serverless functions from Cloud Code to access any AWS service as well as integrate with any existing cloud-based system
- Integration with DynamoDB: Invoke Amazon DynamoDB from Cloud Code to store and manage game and player data
With Amazon GameSparks preview features, a developer can create a turn-based mobile game that runs cross-platform on iOS and Android through Unity, provide guest authentication, send messages when a player’s turn is ready, and integrate with a developers existing leaderboard system using serverless calls. Additional features, regions, platform support, and game engine integrations will be available soon.
AWS will not charge for the use of Amazon GameSparks during the preview period.
To get started, download the SDK directly from the Amazon GameSparks website.