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>> All right, I'm back, ready to do this.
My name is Jasson and I do video game development.
I've been doing indie game dev stuff
for the last close to nine years now,
working on Crea which is out on Steam
and has been up for a number of years.
And I've been kind of figuring out what to do next.
Now I'm working on a new game called Autoboards.
Right now we're going to be looking at PlayFab
which is a product from Microsoft Azure.
This is a sponsored stream by Microsoft Azure
so thank you to them
for actually like, reaching out.
What we're going to be doing is exploring what is PlayFab.
I have tried to keep myself as like pure as possible
while still not going in completely blind.
Looked at a few little things for PlayFab,
but for the most part,
we're just going to be exploring it
figuring out what PlayFab is, what you can do with it.
Yeah, I think it will be fun.
Do what it's capable of.
I think what would make the most sense
is to kind of just look at the tutorial to start with
and see what are kind of like the features that they have.
Here they have a, What is PlayFab?
and so this is the product.
It's, as they say, a complete backend platform
for live games with managed game services,
real-time analytics and LiveOps.
What I'm really interested in
is being able to bring players together
but not have to necessarily do some huge MMO.
So I think that's what
we're really going to be looking out for.
I think that having some backend
that could kind of just like allow players
to connect easily would go such a long ways.
And I've even kind of designed out
some possible features that we would use this back end for
to be able to really help unite players,
make them feel truly connected.
So let's go ahead and jump into PlayFab
and really start seeing what it is about.
But yeah, they actually go over
like all of the major features here.
So this is pretty nice.
Here, the big one is they have cross network identity.
That's really nice where you can say,
hey I want to connect through Steam
or like PSN cross network identity stuff.
You could say, hey, this is my steam account
and my Nintendo switch friend code, whatever it's called,
and be able to use that, but also to be able to jump
between on the Switch and on Steam.
There's like chat that's pretty standard.
That's cool though, that makes sense.
The leaderboards, pretty standard, that's cool though.
One thing I'm seeing here that I really like about this,
this provides a lot of functionality.
This is really good to have a central place
where all of your platforms can connect
and players can be able to play together
because it's so critical
to have your player base not be split
because if you don't get large enough
then kind of just like immediately fizzle out.
I really like that there's this all-in-one solution here
that is cross-platform.
So beyond that they have this like engagement
and retention thing, and this starts getting more
into the forefront sort of stuff, player buckets.
So actually this is pretty cool.
There is so often in game design,
it's really hard to know what's going to be better.
With something like this,
you can actually get solid data.
You know, a really good example
might be let's say that you come up with a tutorial.
You're not really sure how you want to present
the tutorial to players.
And you're interested in like the player retention.
My understanding is that you could say, okay,
here's this player group and here's this other player group.
One player gets tutorial A and this other player group
gets tutorial B and let's see which players
like stick around longer.
And you can then use that information
to decide what is the best tutorial for the game.
And I think that's a really neat.
Typically, I definitely like to use a generated content.
I'm curious to see what that ends up looking like.
Virtually economies, even if you're not doing monetization
can be very interesting.
And that's something that I was thinking about
is like would it be possible
to make a RPG sandbox game, not an MMO
but you do have some virtual economy?
And I think that could be interesting
like having some items in the game that are very rare,
that players could trade,
more or less auction house sort of feature in the game.
The one challenge with that is like fraud prevention
and I'm not really sure the best way to do that.
Wow, they have so many features (laughs), PlayFab is huge.
So CloudScript, I took a peek at this.
So maybe through this, you could say drops
happen through the CloudScript.
There's so much of this that really neat thinking of it
like as a way to make an MMO
without having to have a full on server,
like just really making it feel like you are connected.
Like you could even with real time translation
unite your players
even between different languages,
which is like a huge problem or a challenge, I should say.
Monitor a unified real-time stream.
Okay, okay, okay.
Real-time analytics.
That's pretty cool.
Oh no, I think this could be used in a lot of ways.
Usually I would think it's kind of for player retention
but I could see it being used for other things.
They have a lot of SDKs.
I was kind of taking a peek.
I'm curious to see kind of what the API looks like.
What would it take to integrate it into a game engine?
I could quite possibly use any of these,
could probably use either the C++ or the Lua one.
Now that we've kind of looked at PlayFab,
we have a good understanding now.
All of the functionality that they do provide
let's take a look.
How do we kind of get things set up and get things moving
and then we can also play around with PlayFab itself.
And then we can kind of go back and forth a little bit
on the documentation as well as this other stuff.
So yeah, let's actually get started at the top here.
So this means that you need to get some title ID.
Okay, so we have this game here.
Here's a game, I think this is fine.
Yeah, we can look at the SDKs in a bit.
I'm actually really interested in the CloudScript stuff.
So it says, "CloudScript is JavaScript code
that lives on a remote server, and you can execute it
either from a rule or directly from the client."
I'm curious what that directly from a client is.
What I've seen so far
is that they kind of assume that you're using Unity
which is a pretty safe assumption, to be fair.
We're not, but we can kind of like translate or imagine
what it might look like in C++ or Lua
or whatever we would actually use.
Wow, so you actually can like define
the whole entity on the server, that's interesting.
I guess you would have to do that
if you want it to be able to store player data?
We can look at this in more detail.
I'm just kind of like browsing it.
We don't want to dive too deep into a single thing.
Like you can see there's a lot of information here.
Drop table, it's oh, wow.
They have drop tables too.
Let's kind of pop, go back up
get random results table, it says evaluate random.
I wonder what that is.
Wow, they really have this like all set up,
this is kind of crazy.
Just like looking at all this stuff.
Oh, you could do this and that and that (laughs),
it's actually pretty cool.
A lot of this is just like completely untapped
kind of jumping around here, just a little bit.
Like we've barely even looked at this.
It's really looking
like a great way to be able to bring players together
and really have great connectivity, really excited about it.
It looks great.
We have not looked at this yet.
So I feel like we probably should do that.
Okay, so just kind of exploring it
Crea NG, the next game, Crea 2.
I wonder what this is actually used for.
Like, where is this being displayed?
Monetization, paid to download.
Then we could say this,
we're on all of the platforms.
Title audit history, wonder what that is.
Oh, I see, that's probably for
that logo is this displayed for us.
Keep looking, players, you can see all the players
that have logged in.
This is impressive that you have all of this information
that you could look at on a player.
Like it's kind of crazy.
It looks like you can link identities.
Earlier we asked question,
can you link multiple like identities?
And it looks like the answer is yes.
PlayStream, we looked at PlayStream earlier, right?
So that's just like everything,
like, hey, this player killed a monster.
They opened up a treasure chest.
That's so crazy
that you could be able to track like what players are doing.
And it's like, almost follow the story
or the players narrative of like, oh yeah,
it looks like they went over here
and they were fighting the monsters.
Oh, it looks like they've leveled up.
And then they went back
to the base and they like crafted these items.
And so you can actually get like a nice picture
of what players are doing.
We'll keep moving on.
Hey, look, you can add friends.
You can have your own like friend group here.
Objects, okay, files.
This entity may store up to 10 files.
Okay, this is for a hosting a server,
seems where you can have a dedicated server
that is running through PlayFab.
Okay, okay, let's keep digging through the website here.
Okay, so you can do like cleanse and whatnot.
Oh, hey look, there's CloudScript, huh?
That's pretty crazy that you can just like
write this stuff and put on here.
Experimentation, feature helps you identify
the best strategies for your game and does so
by helping you run multiple concurrent experiments
and ensure statistical trustworthiness.
Okay, so I think what we're going to do is to wrap this up.
Having any sort of online presence,
PlayFab seems like a pretty good option.
It looks awesome.
But thank you guys for joining.
I really appreciate those that stuck around,
joined me on this journey of exploring PlayFab.
I'm glad I had like a reason to actually look at this.
I hope you have a good rest of your day.
Take care, later guys.