Photon architecture ideas

wwang

Hi there,

I am new to Photon and need help to put an architecture together for a turn-based game.

Couple key requirements:
- need a lobby that all logged in users can chat
- need to persist player/game data to database
- need to integrate with payment gateway (Apple Store, etc)
- support virtual currency/items
- support leader board
- support logging/metrics
- support social network for publishing status and/or authentication

Few options:
- Photon Server + Custom Web/DB layer
- Photon Server + Roar Engine
- Photon Cloud + Roar Engine
there are probably few more permutations possible.

I came from the Player.Io world and learned some hard lessons (it was tough to discover limitations during development) so I'd like to dig a little deeper this time.

Any suggestions/insights will be greatly appreciated!

ww

[Deleted User]

Hello,

welcome to our forums and thanks for choosing Photon!

Your options are all valid and I thank that you'll be able to fulfill your requirements with any of these approaches.

You should keep a few things in mind:

Photon Server:
- gives you full flexibility for server-side extensions. Whether you want to use a 3rd-Party-Library, a web service or build your own game logics, persistence framework or whatever - as long as you can integrate it in .NET / C# code, it will work in Photon.

Photon Cloud:
-- no options to modify the server-side logic for now. So you need to do all integration on the client-side. Keep this in mind especially for persistency - your game clients need to publish player / game data to your DB provider.
-- will provide a built-in Photon Chat in near future
-- has custom authentication (Facebook authentication or a custom web service service built by yourself, that can serve as a proxy for any authentication)

That being said, Photon Cloud & Photon Server have (nearly) the same feature set. It's a common approach to start with Photon Cloud for a quick & easy start, and switch to Photon Server later on if you find that you need custom features on the server-side.

Hope this helps! Let us know if you have more (or: more specific) questions.


That being said, we

wwang

thanks Nicole. this is helpful.

Yes, we will start building with Photon Cloud and expand when needed.