The Twitch ChatPlay feature in Lumberyard helps you build gameplay that interacts in real time with Twitch viewers. For example, you can build a game where spectators vote on game outcomes, gift power-ups to their favorite players, or change the level based on the number of viewers watching the broadcaster. Using Lumberyard’s scripting tools, you can easily create chat channel commands for your game. For example, you can build a multiplayer game where viewers vote to drop grenades to the broadcaster by typing #boom in the Twitch chat channel.

The Twitch Metastream feature in Lumberyard allows Twitch streamers to deeply customize broadcasts of your game. When you add Twitch Metastream to your game, streamers can use any HTML tool to create and display dynamic real-time graphics based on the data you provide, similar to those used in professional esports and television broadcasts. For example, overlays can include minimaps, objective status, and player stats that update based on game events. Adding Twitch Metastream to your Lumberyard game is simple – just enable the Metastream Gem for your project and add a single line of code for each piece of data you want to expose.

The Twitch JoinIn feature in Lumberyard lets you build multiplayer games that allow Twitch broadcasters to invite fans to join them side-by-side in the game. Once invited, a fan can jump into the broadcaster’s game with a single click in the Twitch chat channel, while others continue to watch.

Games that support mods and user-generated content have extended lifespans, increased social media exposure, and increased player retention. Lumberyard is mod friendly – you can include components from Lumberyard Editor in your games so your end users can create content with the same tools that you use.

Lumberyard is integrated with Amazon GameLift, a managed service that makes it easy to deploy, operate, and scale session-based multiplayer game servers in the cloud. Amazon GameLift dramatically reduces the time required to build a multiplayer backend from thousands of hours to just minutes. With Amazon GameLift, you can monitor game and player activity, maintain a real-time record of available server capacity, and automatically scale up and down to meet player demand.

Use Lumberyard’s Cloud Canvas tools and solutions to build real-time online game features that access AWS services, such as Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Lambda, Amazon S3, Amazon Cognito, Amazon SNS, and Amazon SQS. Cloud Canvas includes samples that demonstrate how to create and deploy common online services such as server-authenticated gifts, leaderboards, in-game messages, and more.

The Lumberyard Cloud Gems Framework makes it easy to build popular cloud-connected features, such as dynamic content, leaderboards, and daily messages. The Cloud Gems Framework includes the Cloud Gem Portal, a web application that lets you visually manage and administer your cloud features (such as scheduling messages, releasing dynamic content, or deleting a fraudulent leaderboard score), and Cloud gems, which are modular packages of discrete functionality and assets that include everything necessary to include that functionality in your project, including backend and client functionality. You can use cloud gems out of the box in production, and they come with full source code in case you want to customize their behavior.

Lumberyard is integrated with the AWS SDK for C++, allowing you to access the vast compute and storage of the cloud, connect large communities of fans in online multiplayer experiences, and go beyond a single device’s capabilities to create new game experiences. The AWS SDK for C++ helps reduce the complexity of backend coding by providing C++ APIs for dozens of AWS services, such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, and DynamoDB, with support for all major native platforms. This growing set of functionality makes identity management using Cognito even easier, packages managing background data transfer to and from Amazon S3, simplifies the use of SQS by expressing the service directly as a queue data structure, and makes it easier to create and maintain AMI images for EC2.

Lumberyard’s visuals technology allows you to create near-photorealistic and high dynamic range environments and stunning real-time effects. Powerful rendering technology and authoring tools include physically-based shaders, dynamic global illumination, a particle effects system, vegetation tools, real-time dynamic water caustics, volumetric fog, and filmic features such as color grading, motion blur, depth of field, and lens flares.

Use Lumberyard’s Asset Processor to seamlessly add assets into the engine. When you save a file from your preferred graphics software (for example, Autodesk Maya or Adobe Photoshop) into a folder, the Asset Processor automatically processes the file from source art into game-ready assets. If you edit a processed asset, Lumberyard detects the change and automatically updates the asset in the background, in a few seconds, with zero effort on your part.

Lumberyard’s component entity system offers a modern approach to composing complex entities from simpler entities. You can drag and drop components to build desired behavior, edit component settings in the editor, and create scripts in Script Canvas or Lua to quickly change or extend an entity’s behavior. To help you build and iterate on more complex scenes, you can group entities into slices. You can then use those slices to create more complex slices, resulting in a fully cascading prefab system. If you change a slice, you can choose to share your changes with all slice instances or restrict your changes to that one instance.

Lumberyard allows you to create believable characters and high-fidelity performances that immerse players. Lumberyard’s character animation system, Animation Editor (EMotion FX), uses a data-driven visual node approach to animation and includes features such as blend trees, blend spaces, a visual state machine, linear skinning, and joint scaling.

With real-time gameplay editing, you can iterate on gameplay and immediately see your results, without waiting for builds or leaving the editor. For example, you can import game objects, fine tune the game object behavior, and, in one keystroke, play the game that you just created.

Lumberyard's robust and flexible networking subsystem, GridMate, is designed for efficient bandwidth usage and low-latency communications. You can easily synchronize objects over the network with GridMate’s replica framework. GridMate’s session management integrates with major online console services, allowing you to handle peer-to-peer and client server topologies with host migration.

Use Lumberyard’s modular gems system to easily bundle assets and code. You can also add or remove that content from your game project, so the engine contains only the technology that you need. Lumberyard supports custom gems that you create with full access to Lumberyard’s publically-accessible application programming interfaces and events. Or you can use the 25+ gems that are bundled with Lumberyard, which range from text-to-speech, realistic weather effects, gesture controls, VR head-mounted display support, a camera framework, Allegorithmic Substance integration, and more.

Lumberyard includes Wwise LTX, an exclusive, free version of Audiokinetic’s advanced, feature-rich sound engine and authoring tool for PC games. Hundreds of popular games use Audiokinetic’s Wwise audio technology. With minimal dependency on engineers, Wwise LTX allows sound designers and composers to work independently and author rich soundscapes.

Lumberyard provides free access to the full C++ engine source code. Source access gives you full control over how your game uses memory, CPU, and graphics hardware, so you can maximize performance for complex gameplay, graphics, AI, and more. Free access to source code allows you to customize Lumberyard to create differentiators for your game and realize your creative vision.

With terrain tools, weather effects, time of day controllers, input systems, perception handling, a Lua editor, and more, Lumberyard provides the tools to help you achieve your vision and create unique, thrilling, and differentiated content. For more information about Lumberyard's features and how to use them, please see our Lumberyard Editor User Guide and Developer Guide for engineers.