Gaming industry is one of the few industries that have always been in growth stage. Value of the global video games market is increasing by 5% every year and in few years is expected to cross $100 Billion US Dollars. Game developers know this fact and are smart enough to keep working on new games and try hard to go viral and gain revenue. AppWarp, our game development platform, has been helping game developers across the world to launch flawless real-time games quickly and more often than not we receive queries on whether to use AppWarp which is a cloud-based solution or AppWarp S2 which is an on-premise customized gaming server. Let me explain the significance of both these solutions here to help you make the right choice for your game:

AppWarp:

The multiplayer gaming engine was designed to help game developers to offload their work of developing & deploying the backend so that they can focus on the game logic and client-side code instead. Working on backend gets tough what with work on architecture, managing business side logic and multiple client socket sessions. Not only it gets expensive but also remains error prone in most cases. AppWarp offers features such as match making, reduced latency and room/lobby logic and developers can also use gaming backend from App42 Cloud APIs such as user management, push notifications, cloud code, leaderboards, and many others.

When should you use AppWarp?

• AppWarp is great for building applications for the games that don’t require server-side validation of client data and rely only on exchanging information between the clients
• Multiplayer games such as side-scrolling, action combat, racing or simple real-time turn-based games can be developed using the cloud. (In general, these games don’t require custom server-side logic)

AppWarp S2:

There are times when you may need to write your custom server-side logic for your games . . . for instance in a card game. In situations like these you would require AppWarp S2. It is a completely customizable solution that supports multiple client platforms for TCP, UDP, and Web Socket protocols.  The client-side SDKs are used to interact with the server components from the client application running on the end-user’s device. In this scenario, the developer has to manage the sever application and deployment, however, we have a customized platform-as-a-service called GPaaS available to host AppWarp S2 applications.

When should you use AppWarp S2?

• Games that require hosted AI, server-side anti-cheat logic, server generated characters and server-side authentication are the ones where you should use AppWarp S2.
• Casino style card games, MMO, RPG etc. are genres that can be developed using AppWarp S2. (In general, these games require custom server-side logic)
• As AppWarp S2 is built on top of the same platform that powers AppWarp (cloud) service, client SDKs used are the same. Therefore, it is easy to port from AppWarp (cloud) to AppWarpS2 (on-premise).
• You can build and host the server-side application yourself. Henceforth, you can freely integrate any 3^rd party libraries too.

For more information feel free to check out the development center of both AppWarp & AppWarp S2.

If you have queries or need any assistance in developing your game, do write to us at support@shephertz.com or post your queries on our Forum.