Step 1 - Build your own Game Frontend

Overview

The Game Frontend serves as a layer that transfers players' matchmaking requests from players' Game Client to proto messages that Open Match can understand. The Game Frontend typically performs the following tasks:

• Fetches the player data from some backend storage (or Platform Services if required) and authenticates players.
• Submits the matchmaking requests to Open Match by creating a Ticket.
• Communicates the Assignment result back to the Game Client once Open Match found an Assignment for this Ticket.

This tutorial provides a very basic Game Frontend scaffold ($TUTORIALROOT/frontend) that periodically generates batches of fake Tickets, adds them to Open Match, and polls these Tickets for Assignment. Once an Assignment is received it emits a log with the Assignment details (as a proxy for returning the Assignment to the Player) and deletes the Ticket from Open Match.

Links to API Definitions for this tutorial

Make Changes

The Game Frontend uses a helper function makeTicket() in $TUTORIALROOT/frontend/ticket.go to generate a fake Ticket. Any property that is intended to be used for Matchmaking (for instance, game mode in this case) is set as a SearchField on the Ticket. For this tutorial, we create a Ticket that has a game mode specified as a Tag SearchField. The below code snippet picks a random game mode and sets it as a Tag on a fake Ticket.

func makeTicket() *pb.Ticket {
  modes := []string{"mode.demo", "mode.ctf", "mode.battleroyale"}
  ticket := &pb.Ticket{
    SearchFields: &pb.SearchFields{
      Tags: []string{
        modes[rand.Intn(len(modes))],
      },
    },
  }

  return ticket
}

Please copy the above helper or add your own fake Ticket creation logic to $TUTORIALROOT/frontend/ticket.go. Also, you may tweak the size of the Ticket creation batches, polling interval, etc. in $TUTORIALROOT/frontend/main.go.

Configuring

The following values need to be changed if your setup is different from the default in the $TUTORIALROOT/frontend/main.go. The default value assumes you have Open Match deployed under open-match namespace and the Game Frontend under mm101-tutorial namespace in the same cluster:

omFrontendEndpoint - Open Match Frontend endpoint

Build and Push

Now that you have customized the Game Frontend, please run the below commands from $TUTORIALROOT to build a new image and push it to your configured image registry.

# Build the Frontend image.
docker build -t $REGISTRY/mm101-tutorial-frontend frontend/

# Push the Frontend image to the configured Registry.
docker push $REGISTRY/mm101-tutorial-frontend

What’s Next

Let’s proceed to build the Director.