Setting up geckos.io in gdevelop

How do I...?
21

Well MMO and free aren’t two words that really fit together. If you want your game world to be synchronized across players, you have to have some sort of server, and a server requires electricity, maintenance, cooling, a strong network connection, all pretty expensive stuff. Firebase is the least expensive you can get imo. With Firebase Firestore, you have for free 1 GB of storage, 50k write operations a day and 20k reads a day. If you get the paid plan, the free quota still applies but after filling the quota you pay 18 cents per GB per month, 18 cents per 100k write operations and 6 cents per 100k read operations.

In all honesty, I think GDevelop has more qualities than JS game engines (hence why i use it even if I know JS). I doubt you would be able to find a less expensive solution for making a server in an all JS game engine, though here is what I think:

  • Creating game scenes is faster with GDevelop
  • Making character movement is easier with GDevelop thanks to behaviors
  • Making networking is easier in JavaScript if you use Typescript and something like typanion to help verify the in/out coming data.
  • Using firebase is easier to use in JS as much stuff is missing in the firebase extension (notably queries for collections) and the API uses promises which are nicer to use than callback variables.

Personally, I don’t mind that much the cons of GDevelop and if they really are too annoying I occasionally use a JS event in my game.

22

How much could the free 1GB and 50k writes get me? As in players and stuff.

23

It is impossible to evaluate, as it fully depends on how you manage your data. If you listen for changes instead of periodically fetching it, batch requests, have security rules that don’t fetch other documents, only write updates when needed, structure data in a way it doesn’t take much space etc you’ll be able to get way more out of the free quota.

24

So the smarter I use it, the more money I save? Sounds good.