Advice about serving files to Unity game

[mathieso]

I’m writing a game about human flourishing (think positive psychology, Seligman, Haidt, like that… weird, I know). Players wander around about 8 levels, interacting with objects that tell them a little about flourishing or related research.

The content is stored in files on a Reclaim shared hosting account. The data is maintained by a Laravel app I wrote, to make editing easy. The Laravel app exports the content to a bunch o’ JSON files. The game reads the files over the interwebs at run time. The JSON files are a few Mb total. There are maybe 100 Mb of images that go with the JSON files, currently grabbed one at a time as needed.

If the game gets popular (I’m not expecting that, but digits crossed), reading the JSON files from a shared host could cause issues. So, I’m thinking of moving the JSON and image files (and maybe the Laravel app along with them) to a cloudy place that can expand automatically with demand.

Is this hard to set up with Reclaim Cloud? Seems like the whole thing would use only a coupla reserved cloudlets, and a few dynamic cloudlets for, say, 200 simultaneous players. Does that sound even approximately right?

Is RC a good way to do things? Unity and Steam have cloudy data services, but I have a hard time wrapping my head around them.

I must admit to being nervous about the whole cloud thing, though I’m not sure why. All my experience so far has been with VPS and shared hosting.

Kieran

[taylorjadin]

I do think RC would be a good fit here!

If you wanted to move some files or the Laravel app to the Cloud, I would use the New Environment button to make a basic PHP environment:

Then, once you’ve got your files / app moved over there, you would add an IP address, so you can map a custom domain, and use the Let’s Encrypt add-on to issue an SSL cert. Let us know if you run into any roadblocks or questions!

Alternatively, if you prefer the more “VPS-like” route, you can deploy an Ubuntu, Debian, or CentOS VPS and set up the web server and SSL and everything yourself.

Finally, you can do this all with the two-week trial to see how things work for you. The trial does not require a payment method, so it’s a good way to test the waters, no risk. Just go to https://reclaim.cloud and click Sign Up. We only take public sign-ups from .edu emails, so if you want to use a personal email, just shoot us an email over at support@reclaimhosting.com, and we can send instructions on how to sign up with a non edu email!