Redwood is a framework built on top of Unreal Engine 5 that accelerates multiplayer development by elevating studios with prebuilt infrastructure that is flexible and powerful. If you need Unreal 4.27 or 4.26, chat with us and we can see if we can make an exception.
Creating complex multiplayer games usually requires extra infrastructure like databases, data caching servers, extra servers (e.g. for global/cross-server chat and marketplaces), cloud orchestration, and so much more. Many studios don't realize that building games with these kinds of features starts looking more like SaaS (Software as a Service) cloud infrastructure, and they end up spending massive amounts of unplanned time near launch trying to make sure things are scalable. Redwood leverages gold standard SaaS principles along with MMO infrastructure to make it easy for you to ship a multiplayer game of any size, while allowing you to customize every aspect as your needs scale with your development.
Here are some features where Redwood helps out:
- Custom account management
- Configurable and flexible player storage attributes and structures without size limits
- Studio-hosted scalable dedicated servers
- Server hosting and orchestration made easy
- Quickly start/stop dedicated servers as needed by gameplay logic or external indicators
- Scale horizontally (i.e. increase the number of servers) easily by using state-of-the-art orchestration; this comes in handy for games that have waitlists and/or long matchmaking wait times because of a limited number of servers running
- Self-controlled database
- Enable flexible data structures for your game's specific needs instead of needing to fit into a generalized box that other providers enforce (e.g. Steamworks, Epic Online Services, Azure Playfab, etc.)
- Being able to control your data structure is extremely useful as your game grows and needs data representation that doesn't fit into other game services providers' offerings
- Easily create queries to interact with your data in other services (i.e. a custom metrics dashboard, player count/data on an external website, etc.)
- Cloud provider flexibility and redundancy
- Stop relying on a single cloud provider's specialized game services to bring your game from prototype to launch to scaling out
- Redwood's infrastructure is cloud-agnostic allowing you to switch from AWS to Google Cloud to Azure to DigitalOcean to a custom collocated server rack; note that Redwood uses popular, mature, state-of-the-art server orchestration software to accomplish this
- Flexible payment processing
- Be able to switch from in-game purchase systems like Steam Item Store to something like Xsolla or Stripe later on
- This flexibility enables easy systems for early development but more profitable ones as you scale
- Player-hosted dedicated servers
- Reduce server costs and give players autonomy by giving them easy to use, configurable dedicated server software for them to self-host
- Player-hosted servers can be used for games that also have studio-hosted servers
- Mod development kit
- Empower your community with a development kit to create and release mods, extending the lifetime of your game
- Server infrastructure to guide custom features
- Bring life to innovative multiplayer features without having to reinvent the wheel yet that normally would require creating lots of server infrastructure
- Redwood's server infrastructure and documentation help you create original features by starting with multiple examples to build on top of
- For example, creating a cross-server marketplace requires a centralized server to handle player trades