Wondering if there already exists any "cloud" based (web services, or the like) systems for indie programmers to plug games into. I've read that GameSpy has services like this, but I haven't look at them in detail.

I have an early design sketch for what I think would be a light-weight web-server-driven system to do this, but I'm curious if there are already some systems for this.

Also, my lack of web programming skill makes me think this may take longer to do than I'd like to spin my own.

-Matt

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www.mwgames.com ... Dicey Curves, Space Mission, Jump Gate, Gem Raider, DareBase, Castle Danger, Keeps & Moats Chess

Does "for indie programmers" mean "free"?

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Not free -- don't think that would be a viable system ... but accessible, and not requiring a triple-A budget.

-Matt

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www.mwgames.com ... Dicey Curves, Space Mission, Jump Gate, Gem Raider, DareBase, Castle Danger, Keeps & Moats Chess

Amazon, Google, and MS all have cloud based storage solutions. Fortunately, I get Azure for free. It's dead easy to use as well. I don't know about the prices for the other two.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Amazon's EC2 service is a bit odd. I was going to start using it for some Turnkey Linux stuff, but the pricing put me off.

It's free to start off (Yay!), but then it's per hour and I couldn't work out what an average bill would be.

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

Also, what happens if you get slashdotted? You could end up with a huge bill.

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10 PRINT "Bad Monkey ";
20 GOTO 10

I doubt I'd ever use something that wasn't a flat rate, just for that reason.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

What does it cost mere mortals?

-Matt

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www.mwgames.com ... Dicey Curves, Space Mission, Jump Gate, Gem Raider, DareBase, Castle Danger, Keeps & Moats Chess

Read it (and weep?) - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing/

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Does "cloudiness" actually win you anything that you couldn't get with something more traditional (e.g. my hosting is with geekisp, and for <= $10 a month you get hosting on a shared box, where you can put any software you want there)? I'm guessing if you looked around you would find many others that offer similar things.

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Trying is the first step towards failure
b

Guess it comes down to what software you use and what functionality you want. Looks like I couldn't run an ASP.NET web service or use SQL Server on geekisp, for example. "cloud" is a very nebulous term in any case.

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Microsoft XNA MVP

Exactly. In this particular case, I am mainly expecting it to be a web service of some sort. Either through an API with the standardized XML expectations, or through an old-school url-parameter system.

From an app-side, I'd like to not care what platform/language/toolset my app is running on ... it should be able to talk to the system. This would open up the possibility of having the game be available on a variety of systems (iOS, android, Windows, etc.) and players would be able to interact with each other without knowing/caring what piece of equipment or OS you're running on.

From a server-side, having a connection-free, web-driven solution would be nice in that it could be hosted by anything that can serve up web pages, and port 80 is rarely blocked ... keeping tech support issues on the user side to a minimum.

This would only work for non-real-time games that can save true "game state" info.

-Matt

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www.mwgames.com ... Dicey Curves, Space Mission, Jump Gate, Gem Raider, DareBase, Castle Danger, Keeps & Moats Chess

Umm...There are few free services I know of...

NAME->LANGUAGE->EXAMPLE->Comments

Google App engine->Python & Java->Neptune's pride->I am a Google fan

No.de->NodeJS->Warimals (maybe)->RAM:128MB Storage: Dunno

heroku->Any language->Dunno->1 dyno isn't gonna help u much

Free web hosting->PHP->The Ninja-rpg (text-based)->Limited CPU/hour, so might not help much.

There are more so you should Google it.