Glossary

A

Alpha tests

Alpha tests are typically the first round of tests you’ll do for your game. You’ll run these early on in the development phase, and they can help you identify any underlying glitches, design choices, technical issues, and more.

Anti cheat

Anti-cheat software checks for wall hacks, aimbots, boosting, and even whether players are using scripts to cheat.

Auto scaling

Auto scaling is making sure the game is available on more servers, in case there’s an influx in demand.

Backend

Your backend is everything that’s invisible to the player. It’s all the tools and services behind the scenes.

Bare-metal servers

A bare-metal server is a physical machine which lives inside a data centre. It’s a place where you’ll host your games matches and sessions.

Beats

Beats is a lightweight way to send data from multiple sources to a central place.

Beta tests

Beta testing is when you get a group of players to test your game, typically when your game is close to launch day.

CDN

A Content Delivery Network is a network that hosts the same content in multiple places to get it to the end user faster.

Client-server architecture

Client-server architecture is where you have external machines that host your game’s server and players can connect to it.

Cloud servers

Your cloud server is a virtual server. It runs in a cloud computing environment, and it's a place where you’ll host your games’ matches and sessions.

Containers

A container is a packaged set of applications and software. But for your case, it’ll be a packaged version of your entire game, or any updates you need to send out.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is when you regularly merge changes to your code from multiple people into one version.

Data center

A data center is a building or place which you’d use to store all of your servers. They house any critical or large amounts of data, but you’d also use them to process and manage all of that data.

Data packet

A data packet is a chunk of your game, code, or file which you’re sending to another location.

DDoS

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDos) attack is where criminals attempt to overload your servers and cause them to crash.

Deployment

Deployment is the stage where you make your game available to play.

Docker

Docker is a specific piece of software that combines your game, libraries, and config files into a single container.

Downtime

Downtime is when a machine, or computer, crashes or is out of action. It’s rare, but can happen, especially during peak times.

Edge Node

An edge node is a physical or virtual machine that acts as a bridge between a local network and the internet.

Elastic Stack

A collection of open-source tools that help you visualize your data.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a storage system for all your data.

Flex metal servers

Flex metal servers are basically bare-metal machines, but you can have them available in the same amount of time as cloud servers.

Idle machines

Idle machines are machines which is available and not currently being used.

Image (executable)

An image is the final file for your game, ready to run.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is all the hardware and software that comes together to create a computer network.

Infrastructure Automation

Automatically configuring, adding and orchestrating new parts into your infrastructure.

Kibana

Kibana is a web tool that helps you visualize data.

Latency

Latency is how fast data is moving. How quickly does it get from point A to point B? (And it’s generally measured in milliseconds.)

Logstash

Logstash is an app to normalize data from multiple sources.

Matchmaker

Your matchmaker decides which players to group up for a session. It grabs information from each player and then runs it through a set of rules to figure out the best possible match.

Microservice

A microservice is a very small self-contained app, usually focused on a specific task.

Monitoring

Monitoring is a reactive way to spot problems with your system.

Netcode

Netcode is a general term that players use to talk about a game’s network.

Observability

Observability is a proactive way to spot problems in your game.

Orchestrator

An orchestrator figures out where to host game sessions.

Peer-to-peer architecture

Peer-to-peer is when you designate one player as the host of a session, and the other players connect to their machine. Whereas client-side servers are external machines which hosts your game’s sessions.

Repo

Your repo, or repository, is where you store all your project’s files.

Resource profile

A resource profile will figure out how many resources your game will take, and in turn, how much compute power a server needs to reserve to run your game.

Sandbox Environment

A sandbox environment is an isolated area where you can test code.

Scalability

Scalability is whether you can easily add or take away without problems.

Session hosting

Session hosting is when a server, or computer, runs your game’s matches. Each match, with a set group of people, is considered a session.

Soft launch

Soft launching is when you release your game to a specific market or a restricted audience, before your full launch.

Staging

The final testing stage before you launch.

Tick rate

Tick rate is how often a game refreshes its information. Usually, it’s measured in hertz. For example, a 128-tick server will update 128 times a second.

The Gameye Glossary

A