Does anyone here have experiencing integrating a mobile game with a back-end server to store player accounts and game data? If so, any recommendations?

I had been considering Google App Engine but the imminent price increase suggests other options might be more affordable.

Any thoughts on Moai Cloud, PHP, Roar Engine, Node.js or any of the other myriad possibilities?

Will Ansca ride to the rescue with its own cloud offering?

You can't really compare them without considering your needs and experience.

How much experience do you have setting backends? What languages are you familiar with? What kind of scale are you looking for? Moai Cloud, Roar, and App engine are setup to make scaling easier for you. And looks like Roar is setup with certain types of games in mind.

Node.js is server / framework for developing web servers with V8 and Javascript. Php is just a language and requires a webserver to go with it.

Node.js is going to give you better raw performance over PHP, but if you plan on scaling you're going to need to figure out the backend is going to be setup with proxies, web servers, app servers, storage (caching, db, etc).

Personally, I'm looking into an Erlang backend writing my own server, but it sounds like you're just starting out. Might be better to look into the services.

I just set up a CloudServer from Rackspace that will initially run me about $11 per month. I already have a dedicated server from HostGator that I use for other server-based projects, but I wanted something I can scale *easily* in the future when one of my apps makes it big. (Hey, think positive!)

In one of my other projects I have a server-based back-end for clients and then data is served via an Amazon S3 account, but I'm switching that over to Rackspace for one main reason -- testing has shown RS to be *much* faster than S3 and for what I'm doing the speed difference is visible.

Price is close enough that I don't remember who's cheaper.

The downside to either of those options is that unless you already have the Linux knowledge to set up a server, it's an INCREDIBLE time sink.

I pay $219 a month for my server from Hostgator and it came ready to use, they keep it updated with the latest security patches, and if I need something new/different on the server I submit a ticket and they do it for me, so the extra money I pay them is well worth it.

Jay

Moai Cloud is free during the beta, which will probably be a long time ;)

http://getmoai.com/get-started/moai-faq/moai-cloud-hosting-options/

"Turnkey hosting option:

This is the default option, in which Moai allocates resources to your services based on the number of requests they receive and amount of work they do. We scale your Moai services out for you as your game traffic and load grows, load balance the requests, and make sure your services are running within reasonable operating limits and backed up every day. You can do custom logging from your services, pause your services whenever you need to, and create as many as you want. Your bill is based on usage of bandwidth, data, and CPU. Hosting is free during the beta and will continue to be free for accounts with low request and load volumes (e.g. when you’re just building your game or first releasing it and working to get players to try it)."

pubnub.com is another option you might want to consider. they have the necessary support for corona / lua.

Does PubNub handle server-side storage of client data? I thought it was just for messaging, without persistent storage.

Hi Dotnaught,

What kind of functionality are you specifically looking for?

We're currently developing a solution and are looking to get some developers on board soon to help test and steer development.

Ali

Primarily a way to store user account data off-device, so that, for example, in-app purchased items can be tracked and restored if necessary. I'd prefer something that isn't tied to a proprietary service, in case migration becomes necessary. I assume this could be done with any LAMP setup.

I'd be curious to hear what approaches Corona devs are using for this.

But the project I'm working on has a persistent world as a second phase, if the first-phase game client finds an audience, so I'm looking at possible platform-as-a-service offerings, something that could act as a master server since multiplayer game clients can't be trusted.

Hi,

I see. Those are features that we are currently implementing so you might find our service useful. The persistent world feature is a much bigger task and although it's on our road map, it won't be ready for awhile.

We're currently at a very early stage in development, but once we're closer to the beta I'll be posting some more information in the forums.

As a games developer, we (my company) have used OpenFeint as well as rolled our own (which was the inspiration for the new service naturally).

OF does have the ability to store user data for you (Network Save Card) but if I remember correctly they only allow a very small amount of data (250k). Additionally it seems like Corona doesn't yet support that feature on Android.

If it's purely to keep track of IAP purchases, then you can probably through something together relatively easily. My weapon of choice would be Ruby Sinatra running on Heroku. It's very lightweight and you can do a lot with very little code. If you've got the time, that might be worth investigating.

Ali

Hi Dotnaught,

Roar Engine provides a persistent, server authoritative, cross-platform game model and player data storage platform.

It's a hosted service, free up to 100 DAUs, and scales to millions of DAUs.

We're still in private beta while we work on improving our documentation and examples but there are a couple of live games built on Roar and half a dozen more being released before the holidays. Check out our docs here: http://support.roarengine.com/kb, examples here: https://github.com/roarengine/ and videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/RoarEngineDemos.

Let me know if you sign up for an account - www.roarengine.com - and I'll activate it for you.

Cheers,
Dave from Team Roar

Is there any sample Corona client code for connecting to the Moai cloud?