Databases for Games

Modeling Game Player Data with Amazon DynamoDB

Imagine you are building an online multiplayer game, such as a battle royale game. In your game, groups of players join a session to play a game, and you have to update a specific player’s record to indicate the amount of time the player has been playing, the number of kills they’ve recorded, or whether they won the game. Users want to see old games they’ve played, either to view the games’ winners or to watch a replay of each game’s action.

Amazon DynamoDB is a popular database service modelling game player data because it is designed for high-scale use cases where consistent performance is critical as your game grows. Amazon DynamoDB scales to more than 100 TB with no performance degradation. It is accessible over HTTP(S), and uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication. You don’t need to manage servers and apply patches to any infrastructure and Amazon DynamoDB handles upgrades, backups, and other administrative tasks, so that you can focus on developing your game.

In this lab, you learn advanced data modeling patterns in Amazon DynamoDB. When using DynamoDB, it is important to consider how you will access your data (your access patterns) before you model your data. We walk through an example multiplayer game, discuss the access patterns in the game, and show how to design a DynamoDB table to handle the access patterns by using secondary indexes and transactions.

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