How to build a basic Matchmaker

Objectives

• Understand how to use Open Match for Matchmaking.
• Author a simple Match Function, Game Frontend and Director in Golang.
• Build and run an E2E Matchmaker by connecting these components to an Open Match deployment.

Prerequisites

Set up a Kubernetes Cluster

Some basic understanding of Kubernetes, kubectl is required to efficiently completely this tutorial. Follow the instructions to set up a Kubernetes cluster, install and configure kubectl to connect to this cluster.

Install Open Match

Lets setup Open Match next by running the steps in Install Open Match Core. Please be sure to also install the default Evaluator.

Set up Image Registry

Please setup an Image registry(such as Docker Hub or GC Container Registry) to store the Docker Images used in this tutorial. Once you have set this up, here are the instructions to set up a shell variable that points to your registry:

REGISTRY=[YOUR_REGISTRY_URL]

If using GKE, the below command can be used to populate the image registry:

REGISTRY=gcr.io/$(gcloud config list --format 'value(core.project)')

Get the Tutorial template

Make a local copy of the Tutorials Folder. Checkout release-x.y branch（e.g. release-1.3, release-1.4） of the Open Match Git repository. Use tutorials/matchmaker101 of release-x.y branch as a working copy for all the instructions in this tutorial.

For convenience, set the following variable:

TUTORIALROOT=[SRCROOT]/tutorials/matchmaker101

Create the Tutorial namespace

Run this command to create a namespace mm101-tutorial in which all the components for this Tutorial will be deployed.

kubectl create namespace mm101-tutorial

References

Please read through the Matchmaking Guide as the Matchmaker in this tutorial is modeled around the components introduced in the Guide. Also, keep the API Reference handy to look up Open Match specific terminology used in this document.

A complete solution for this tutorial can be found at tutorials/matchmaker101/solution To use the solution directly, just run the “Build and Push” step in each of the component sections and then go to Deploy and Run

Overview

The goal is to build a basic game mode based Matchmaker where there are a fixed set of game modes and each Player intends to find a match for a specific game mode.

The tutorial walks through building the Game Frontend, Director, Match Function and then deploys them together. Here is a high-level flow once all these components are set up:

• The Game Frontend creates Tickets that specified a game mode.
• The Director requests for matches for a specific game mode.
• The Match Function queries for Tickets from the current pool that match this constraint and groups available Tickets into match proposals.
• The Director receives the matches and sets fake Assignments for Tickets in these.
• The Game Frontend receives these Assignments and then deletes the Tickets.

For the curious mind

Open Match enables the user to plug in a custom component called the Evaluator. The Evaluator is responsible for deduplicating any concurrently generated proposals, discarding or promoting the proposals as result Matches. Open Match provides a default Evaluator that this tutorial uses. This tutorial is designed not to generate concurrent conflicting proposals so Evaluation is a no-op. The deployment step deploys the default Evaluator in the tutorial namespace and configures this in Open Match. See the Evaluator Guide for details on proposal evaluation.

Next Steps