SeeSaw - Corona turn-based game engine

Corona Classifieds Other Products and Services
#61

I was doing some reasearch into Parse’s services and though it looks very easy to use, I’m wondering if it’s really the best BaaS provider cost wise. I did some back of the napkin calculations for their free service, and it seems like any turn based game that has moderate success will quickly chew through the 1M api call monthly limit.

Let’s say you have a game such as Words With Friends, and each multiplayer session takes on average 40 API calls between both users getting logged in, getting set up in a match, sending and recieving notifications about whose turn it is, etc. This equals 25,000 total games that can be played per month. Let’s say you rack up 5,000 app downloads between iOS and Android, that comes out to 5 games per user per month. I would prefer if my users could play way more than 5 games per month without costing me tons of money, and more importantly I would like to be able to support way more than 5,000 users. Throw in the fact that Parse will require that you have Corona Enterprise to support Android push notifications and this is starting to look real expensive.

I started looking for alternatives to Parse and came across StackMob. It may not be as easily integrated as Parse but they recently changed their pricing structure so that their core service is free and you get unlimited API calls. They also offer push notification services for Android and iOS for up to 1M notifications, but again, I think this can be used up quickly. I personally believe it might make more sense to use StackMob to handle all the features that Nick is looking to implement in SeeSaw, and use PushWoosh to handle the push notifications because for a measly ~$50 a month you get unlimited pushes to 2M devices.

Does anybody have experience using StackMob? Nick, do you think your library would be difficult for us to integrate with a different BaaS provider?

For anyone interested, this is the article I came across: https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/02/stackmobs-api-is-free-whats-the-catch/

#62

Thanks for this. I’m sure I researched StackMob and came up with a major roadblock at the time, but looking through their website and API I can’t remember what that was - perhaps it no longer exists. If anything their REST API calls look easier to use than parse.com.

My game is carefully planned to use as few API calls as possible, so I calculated that if I reached the API call limit I *should* be making a lot more money than parse.com will cost. However it shouldn’t be too hard to switch to stackmob, and I might just do that as there doesn’t seem to be a downside as far as I can see at the moment.

#63

I just remembered what the roadblock was with StackMob - calls need to be made using OAuth 2.0. It’s not built into Corona and there doesn’t seem to be a ready-to-go library out there. I’ll look into what it entails.

#64

Hi Nick, thanks for looking into it. I’m on my phone so I can’t do a more thorough search, but i came across this Lua library which attempts to implement oauth 2.0 support. Do you think it could be useful?

https://github.com/ignacio/LuaOAuth/blob/master/src/OAuth2.lua

#65

I’d just like to add that I’m very interested in this, and would def be willing to purchase a template for a turn-based game! There seems to be a lot of upcoming ways, expensive ways, to get real-time multiplayer going. But not much in terms of turn-based.

#66

Yes +1 for sure!

#67

Nick, for the record I`m  very interested in an aphla release version as you mentioned. Really eager to get started on our project :slight_smile:

#68

Hey nick,

Count me in for an alpha release too!

cheers

#69

Any news?

#70

hey nick,

How are the notifications coming along?  I also noticed the demo in test flight has stopped working recently - did you changed something? is there a new version I can play with?

Merry Christmas! :slight_smile:

Cheers

#71

I’m still exploring options for push notifications. Pushwoosh is the easiest method, but that involves a $40/month subscription to allow remote API notifications (i.e. sending a push notification to an opponent when you’ve had your turn).

Using parse.com would only work for iOS as mentioned by others in this thread.

So the final option is to set up a .php script on a server to process requests from the app and send the notification request to apple/google. 

Push notifications are quite a key feature for turn-based games, but if people aren’t too bothered about having those available immediately I’ll try and release an alpha version next week.

#72

Hi Nick, I think this is a really great idea and would love to try this out. I’m starting my first Corona app and I’m not at a stage in development where I can implement this yet, but I am definitely interested in future use (within the next few months). Also, this is one of those things I wouldn’t mind paying money for as it saves me time and you have clearly put some hard work into it. If you’re good at what you do, don’t do it for free! ;)  

I look forward to any updates on your progress.

#73

I’d be interested in this template as well. Would beat starting from scratch for sure. Let us know what the progress is.

Enjoy the holidays!

#74

Any updates? :slight_smile:

#75

I was doing some reasearch into Parse’s services and though it looks very easy to use, I’m wondering if it’s really the best BaaS provider cost wise. I did some back of the napkin calculations for their free service, and it seems like any turn based game that has moderate success will quickly chew through the 1M api call monthly limit.

Let’s say you have a game such as Words With Friends, and each multiplayer session takes on average 40 API calls between both users getting logged in, getting set up in a match, sending and recieving notifications about whose turn it is, etc. This equals 25,000 total games that can be played per month. Let’s say you rack up 5,000 app downloads between iOS and Android, that comes out to 5 games per user per month. I would prefer if my users could play way more than 5 games per month without costing me tons of money, and more importantly I would like to be able to support way more than 5,000 users. Throw in the fact that Parse will require that you have Corona Enterprise to support Android push notifications and this is starting to look real expensive.

I started looking for alternatives to Parse and came across StackMob. It may not be as easily integrated as Parse but they recently changed their pricing structure so that their core service is free and you get unlimited API calls. They also offer push notification services for Android and iOS for up to 1M notifications, but again, I think this can be used up quickly. I personally believe it might make more sense to use StackMob to handle all the features that Nick is looking to implement in SeeSaw, and use PushWoosh to handle the push notifications because for a measly ~$50 a month you get unlimited pushes to 2M devices.

Does anybody have experience using StackMob? Nick, do you think your library would be difficult for us to integrate with a different BaaS provider?

For anyone interested, this is the article I came across: https://blog.stackmob.com/2013/02/stackmobs-api-is-free-whats-the-catch/

#76

Thanks for this. I’m sure I researched StackMob and came up with a major roadblock at the time, but looking through their website and API I can’t remember what that was - perhaps it no longer exists. If anything their REST API calls look easier to use than parse.com.

My game is carefully planned to use as few API calls as possible, so I calculated that if I reached the API call limit I *should* be making a lot more money than parse.com will cost. However it shouldn’t be too hard to switch to stackmob, and I might just do that as there doesn’t seem to be a downside as far as I can see at the moment.

#77

I just remembered what the roadblock was with StackMob - calls need to be made using OAuth 2.0. It’s not built into Corona and there doesn’t seem to be a ready-to-go library out there. I’ll look into what it entails.

#78

Hi Nick, thanks for looking into it. I’m on my phone so I can’t do a more thorough search, but i came across this Lua library which attempts to implement oauth 2.0 support. Do you think it could be useful?

https://github.com/ignacio/LuaOAuth/blob/master/src/OAuth2.lua

#79

Up this!

Best regards,

Tomas

#80

Ok - the game that I built the engine for is finally finished and going to apple today.

So I’ll now be able to concentrate on tidying it up ready for release as a template, see if I can get it to work with StackMob etc.