Byte Wars: Game Development Tutorial with SDK Services

Earlier this year, our team at AccelByte was juggling between managing different internal game projects that we built previously over the years. Each game project had different levels of fidelity visually and served different purposes. We lost track of what game project was a sample game, demo game, tutorial game, or just another game we were maintaining 🤕.

• Not lightweight to install or use
• Focused more on gameplay and visuals as opposed to usability
• Lack of good documentation surrounding them
• Challenges in sharing them publicly due to copyright restrictions

As we scale, one of our goals is to improve our documentation to include step-by-step walkthroughs or tutorials for how to achieve X using AccelByte’s backend. Given all of the above, we decided to start afresh and address all of these challenges in one go. 

Enter DevEd and Byte Wars! 🚀

What is Byte Wars?

Byte Wars is the official tutorial game for AccelByte Gaming Services (AGS). We assembled our team of experienced game developers to come up with a game inspired by Retro games like Space Invaders and Gravity Wars, (yes we’re really talking Retro here) that was simple, fun yet compelling to play. This is where Byte Wars came into existence! Our goal was to solve some of the challenges we mentioned above:

• Be lightweight on both storage and processing
• Be fun and visually appealing
• Be built in-house with a source available license so that you can use code snippets from it as is in conjunction with our services for free
• Accompany every major feature with a Byte Wars tutorial module documentation that explains how to integrate our services easily
• Act as a medium to test our Game SDK and Backend services so that we can discover challenges earlier with an actual game

Byte Wars is intended to act as a sample project that can be used as a reference on the best practices to integrate our services into your game. We created Byte Wars from scratch as a fully functional offline game. This offline game was then brought online with the power of AccelByte's platform by adding services from each of our areas like Access, Play, and Engagement. 

Every tutorial module walks you through a step-by-step guide to add a specific feature to Byte Wars which you can then translate into your own game. Byte Wars is available for both Unreal Engine and Unity. As a game developer, you can also jump to any specific tutorial module depending on your needs. This can be done using our Module Manager configurations as shown below. The Module manager will configure the game to the correct state to tackle a specific tutorial without needing to have done all the tutorials before it.

What exactly is Developer Education?

Byte Wars is built and managed by the Developer Education (DevEd) team at AccelByte. We see Developer Education as the process of providing aspiring developers with the necessary tools (Documents, Videos, etc) to succeed in using AccelByte’s Products and Services such that they are empowered to use our services on their own with minimal support needed. 

The DevEd team's responsibility encompasses but is not limited to the following: 

• Creating tutorial documentation using Byte Wars so that developers can start from a blank project and follow along to 'achieve X'
• Staying involved with our internal Product Teams to test out how a feature can be used and give them our feedback
• Helping our internal support team with any answers on best practices to integrate
• Supporting our business development and marketing teams with any demos required
• Publishing white papers and submitting talks

What’s Next?

There are a lot of game development tutorial modules already available on our new documentation portal and we plan to keep adding more every other week (sometimes even faster 🙂) for more coverage of our features. We also know that game publishing can be a quite challenging process and some issues are only discovered at the tail end of the life cycle during this phase. Keeping this in mind, we aim to publish Byte Wars publicly on different platforms for us to empathize with these challenges better and make the game available for everyone to play! 

For the rest of this year, we plan to add more tutorial modules surrounding AGS features like leaderboards, playing with friends and parties, and logging in with native platforms amongst others. We also plan to publish Byte Wars on STEAM. 

We will keep expanding our library of tutorials even after this and striving to make this game better along the way. If there are other topics you would like to see tutorials for, please reach out to us and let us know!