The Software Architecture of Palia
Singularity6’s debut game, Palia, is a free-to-play cozy online multiplayer community simulator. A place where players can play alone or with their friends to experience a beautiful and welcoming world which can be explored and personalized.
Social interaction and a persistent shared world are key features of the game. But these elements are also some of the most challenging to implement, scale, distribute geographically, and operate at minimal operational cost and negative player impact.
Players experience the art and soul that our development team has poured into the game, but the infrastructure that makes it all possible behind the scenes is hidden from view. We are proud of what our team has accomplished with Palia, and we want to spotlight the studio’s hard work, including what players don’t experience directly. We also want to share some important lessons learned during our journey; we hope that sharing the lessons learned while developing Palia can be useful to others facing similar challenges.
Building an online multiplayer title from scratch benefits from a robust and proven game engine. We made the choice to build Palia using Unreal Engine. Unreal gives us powerful tools to build with out of the box, such as a strong networking and replication library to build social features, a graphics pipeline to build a beautiful world, a powerful physics engine that can simulate complex environments, and so much more. We use Unreal Engine for our game servers as well as our client, which gives players a real-time interactive environment.
