About a year ago, I made a tutorial about how to integrate an Unreal Engine project with Amazon GameLift. That older tutorial can be found in this forum post. Then, recently, I decided to update this tutorial to go over more in depth different concepts involving multiplayer development in UE4, GameLift, and other AWS services while correcting issues from the old tutorial as well as following best practices. I try my best to explain things that may not be very well documented, and the hope is that the process for hosting an Unreal Engine server on AWS while using services like GameLift, Cognito, API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDb becomes much easier and more beginner-friendly. Here are the different parts of the tutorial series:
Part 1 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 1 - UE4 Source) - YouTube) - Installing Prerequisite files (Visual Studio, Unreal Engine source, etc.)
Part 2 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 2 - GameLift Server SDK) - YouTube) - Buidling the GameLift Server SDK
Part 3 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 3 - Hosting Resources) - YouTube) - Uploading a server build to GameLift, making a fleet, and creating a queue
Part 4 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 4 - FlexMatch) - YouTube) - Setting up for FlexMatch, which involves creating a matchmaking rule set, creating a matchmaking configuration, creating an SNS topic for FlexMatch event notifications, creating a table in DynamoDb to store information about specific event notifications, and creating a Lambda function that is subscribed to the SNS topic
Part 5 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 5 - Cognito) - YouTube) - Setting up for Cognito, which involves creating a user pool, , adding the Cognito hosted UI to our Unreal Engine game client, and making a request to an API method on API Gateway that will call a Lambda function for getting temporary user pool tokens
Part 6 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 6 - Client Service) - YouTube) - Setting up the client service (API Gateway + Lambda), which is an API that contains methods that clients will invoke for interacting with GameLift and other AWS services
Part 7 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 7 - Client) - YouTube) - Modifying the Unreal Engine client code so that the client can use the Cognito user pool tokens to invoke the client service in a way that will ultimately lead to clients connecting to the game server hosted on AWS
Part 8 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 8 - Server & Backfill) - YouTube) - Modifying the Unreal Engine server code so that the server can replicate matchmaking information to the clients, accept player sessions when players connect to the game server, terminate the game session when the “game” is over, handle server process interruptions, handle backfill requests, and more
Part 9 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 9 - Windows & RDP) - YouTube) - Remotely accessing a Windows EC2 instance in a GameLift fleet
Part 10 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 10 - Linux) - YouTube) - Cross compiling an Unreal Engine server for Linux on Windows, packaging a Linux server build, uploading that server build to GameLift, creating a fleet out of that build, and remotely accessing a Linux EC2 instance in a GameLift fleet
Part 11 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 11 - Auto-Scaling) - YouTube) - Going over auto-scaling, specifically target-tracking, in order to try to ensure that there is enough EC2 instance capacity in your fleets for fluctuating player demand/traffic
Part 12 (How To Make A Multiplayer Game With Unreal Engine and Amazon GameLift (Part 12 - Pricing & Costs) - YouTube) - Going over pricing details and the free tier for the various AWS services used throughout the tutorial
Link to the Unreal Engine Client/Server code: GitHub - chris-gong/gamelift-example-ue4: Sample project integrating AWS GameLift with Unreal Engi
Link to the AWS Lambda Backend code: GitHub - chris-gong/gamelift-example-lambda: AWS Lambda backend for the GameLift Unreal Engine sam