Turns out I thought I knew more than I really did thus I’ve been spending much of my hobbyist time learning more AWS. I’m pretty stubborn about a local dev experience which takes time to establish an appropriate mental model to do. So it goes. Pro tip: find your application “interfaces” and discover what tooling can be used instead of a cloud resource (e.g. a mongoDB compatible document database is the interface to which AWS DocumentDB and MongoDB are concrete implementations). I have a docker compose file I use for local dev. It’s the best setup I’ve found for myself but I am open for advice.
Anyways I’d just like to voice myself as a possible target audience. Being able to develop locally is important to me and the hardest parts with AWS is having little support on how exactly to do this. Assuming this is even a fair ask to make…
P.S. another pro tip; I use Unity + Mirror networking for my multiplayer games. GameLift requires code integrated into your game code for it to function. I use nested prefabs to handle two cases: (1) when I want gamelift code to execute and (2) when I just want to focus on writing the multiplayer code. My production code uses (1) and I usually do development in (2). (2) is a child of (1).
P.P.S. GameLift has a lag of about 2-3 minutes when registering my running game server in Unity editor with a “gamelift anywhere fleet” before it can receive traffic. I didn’t know about this for a while and stressed out over the inconsistency. Make sure to measure timings on this so you don’t go crazy.