Talo - an open source backend for managing players, leaderboards, stats + more

tscu

Hey everyone! I wanted to share the project I’ve been working on: a set of tools for building games faster and a dashboard to learn more about your players. In short, it's an open source alternative to services like Playfab or Unity Game Services.

Talo is the easiest way to add leaderboards, player authentication, peer-to-peer multiplayer and more to your game. The Godot plugin securely authenticates players, works online and offline, and only takes a few minutes to setup.

Here are some of the things you can do with Talo:

👥 Player management (persistent data, groups and authentication)
💬 Peer-to-peer multiplayer with persistent data
🕹️ Leaderboards
📊 Game analytics (global stats, player stats and event tracking)
⚙️ Load game config from the cloud
💾 Game saves (online and offline)
🗣️ Game feedback from players
🔔 Player presence (see if players are online and set custom statuses)

Check out the docs (https://docs.trytalo.com) for more info.

You can get the Talo Godot plugin on the Godot Asset Library, itch.io or GitHub.

I would love to hear any feedback on Talo - especially if there’s something missing that you would find valuable for your own game. We also have a Discord for support, roadmap discussions and to show off your game. Thanks!

tscu

We just released game channels! Game channels are a way of sending messages between players that are subscribed to a topic in real-time using sockets. You can use them for chat systems or even game state updates.

Channels can be created by players, joined and left. A channel’s owner can update channel information, transfer ownership and delete the channel.

They also have props which let you store extra custom data about your channel. For example, you could create a public channel for all players to join or a private channel where players need to reach a certain level before they can join.

Check out the channel docs for Godot here: https://docs.trytalo.com/docs/godot/channels. There’s also a new demo showing off how to build a chat system with just one script.

You can get the latest version of Talo from the Godot Asset Library or GitHub.

kuligs2

tscu But can you send objects? Like images or videos? Also does this "secure" connection is p2p? and data goes only between peers or does it go to a "master" server somewhere in talo warehouses?

tscu

kuligs2 I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to encode images and videos into a string. But as long as something can be represented as a string it can be sent across channels.

Messages do get routed via the Talo master socket server first before being sent out just so that 1) client permissions can be checked and 2) so that clients have minimal data being shared between them

kuligs2

tscu idk... seems very sus.. i wouldnt want to trust some "master" server with my game data that i have no control over. ofc i could host the talos server myself, but the licenses and management, and given that i would have to spend time looking through source to see if there is no sussy shenanigans, seems like too much work to make something like keep track of global stats or chat p2p. As an indie dev (1 man band) seems a bit too much work for something that is supposed to be simple.

In the latest version of godot, they added a way to serialize objects, which means you can send objects, like resources and stuff..

housatic

tscu I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to encode images and videos into a string

In web APIs it's normal to send images as Base64-encoded strings, it shouldn't be a problem IMO 🙂 I don't personally have a use for this since I'm making basic singleplayer games, but it looks like a neat tool!

tscu

kuligs2 I think those are all fair concerns but like you mentioned, its all open source so any suspicious behaviour would be front and centre. I'm happy to point you to any bits of the code if you have any questions. The idea is that Talo takes away all the work that isn't building your game but I appreciate your point about the trust trade-off 🙂.

Re: master server data - none of the data in socket messages is stored anywhere i.e. if you're sending chat messages between players, they aren't stored in Talo. The only thing that is stored is the event type (e.g. "message sent", "player identified", "connection opened") so that later down the line I can provide some more useful analytics in your game's dashboard.

Tomcat

kuligs2 and given that i would have to spend time looking through source to see if there is no sussy shenanigans

This is probably a common problem with all open source programs. But you can try to trust proprietary programs.

kuligs2

Tomcat No, just write it yourself. Either spend time learning someone elses code or, spend a little more time figuring out your own.

Tomcat

kuligs2 No, just write it yourself.

This path can lead you far to nowhere. Following this "logic" you should write everything yourself, starting, at least, with the engine. I think paranoia should be limited. Are you sure that the air you breathe does not contain psychotropic substances (sprayed from airplanes)?

kuligs2

Tomcat im not at the stage to think that frogs are gay. either way it does not lead to nowhere, it gives you more control over what you create, also you learn something from the process. Relaying on other people and trusting someone that offers something for "free" in this day and age is as like trusting a bear that assures he not gonna eat you.

tscu

Thanks guys but very keen to keep this thread on topic 🙂. I chose to build an open source project so that the community can learn from and contribute towards building a cool platform that works for everyone. In other news...

🚀 Talo Godot 0.17.0 recently launched adding support for sockets on in web exports! Talo now uses a socket ticketing system for extra security. The new system requires each socket connection to have a fresh authentication token. Importantly, the new API is compatible with the browser implementation for web sockets.

Lots of stuff is also coming soon like managing channels from the dashboard, live config socket notifications and manually updating player stats, stay tuned!

You can grab the latest release on GitHub (would appreciate a star if you find Talo useful!) or the Godot Asset Store.

tscu

Talo 0.18.0 has now been released with an update to live config! Previously, you would need to poll for live config updates but you can now get real-time config updates via the Talo Socket. Check out the live config docs here for more info.

Live config in the dashboard

Live config is Talo's way of updating your game's config from the web dashboard.

You can grab the latest release on GitHub or the Godot Asset Library.

tscu

Some highly requested features have been added to Talo in the last few days: editing player stat values and leaderboard scores.

To update a player’s stat value, you can visit their profile, choose a stat, and click the edit button:
Editing a stat

For editing leaderboard scores, you can go via a player’s profile or the leaderboard’s entries page:
Editing a leaderboard score

We’ve also added a new “find player” API, allowing you to search by a player’s unique ID.

The new find player API lays the groundwork needed for the upcoming Presence API: a new way of seeing online/offline/custom status players. This opens up new features like friends lists, player parties and more.

You can download the latest release (0.19.0) from GitHub or the Godot Asset Library

tscu

🔔 Player presence is here!
Talo will now automatically track player online statuses. You can also provide custom statuses for players like "In a match" or "In a lobby".

The dashboard will now display stats about your players - namely how many players you have and how many are online. You can also see if a player is online directly from the dashboard.

🎯 We've also added "refresh intervals" to our leaderboards, allowing you to easily create daily, weekly monthly and yearly leaderboards.

For the Godot plugin, there's a new flag to fetch archived leaderboard entries (e.g. from the previous day with daily leaderboards), as well as much easier ways to listen for game channel messages.

The chat and leaderboards demos have been updated to reflect all the new functionality in this release.

As always the latest release is available on GitHub or the Godot Asset Library.

tscu

General updates
It's been a little while! Since last month there's been quite a few updates and optimisations to the Talo Godot plugin including:

Extending RefCounted instead of Node for better memory management
Significantly improving typing by preferring to return internal classes with strictly defined properties
New signals for when game channels (our socket-based way of sending messages between players) are joined, left, deleted or their ownership is transferred
A new signal for when a Talo Socket error is received, allowing you to gracefully handle situations like rate limiting or invalid data being sent

Game stats updates
In addition to this, our game stats APIs have been significantly improved with the following additions:

You can now fetch available stats for your game via the stats API
Stats now have history and you can fetch this for an individual player or globally
Stat history can be filtered by start and end dates
Global stat history contains metrics about the global value like the minimum, maximum, average and median values during the filtered period

We've also written a short guide about how to track stats in your game using Talo which you can find here. The Godot game stat docs have been updated to include these new APIs.

Leaderboards overview
For anyone curious about Talo's leaderboards we've also published a YouTube video with a quick overview of all the leaderboards features and demos:

tscu

👋 Hey everyone, there's been lots of updates in the last 3 months - here’s a quick overview:

Game channels (socket-based multiplayer)

Channel members API: fetch all the players in a channel
Private channels: invite-only channels that are not publicly listed
Temporary membership: if enabled, players are removed from the channel when their session ends

By far the biggest release is channel storage: a shared space where all members can read/write/update and delete data. For example, in a channel created for a guild, you could store the "shared gold" value. All guild members would be able to read and update this value. Check out the docs for Godot here or take a look at the new demo to learn more.

This Godot demo is less than 100 lines and shows how to easily drop-in socket-based multiplayer mechanics into your game:

Game analytics

Game stat metrics page: view global game stat metrics:

Event breakdown: break down events by their props:

Player session tracking: see how many players are playing your game plus average playtime stats

Godot Asset Store

Talo is now available on the newly-released Godot Asset Store: https://store-beta.godotengine.org/asset/talo/talo-game-services

Everything in Talo is completely open source, check out the GitHub: https://github.com/talodev

Johan_Lopes

Hi tscu! Game dev here. I'm trying for 3 MONTHS to find a way to implement p2p in my fighting game. Nothing worked so far. What I want is that players open the game and press CREATE LOBBY, or see a list of lobbies, click in one of them and then click JOIN LOBBY. Then lobby creator gets ID 1 (becomes server) and lobby joiner gets random ID. From there, I assume.
But no.
Everything I tried requires the host to tell the other player his ID/ lobby ID, then the player must copy and paste it. THAT's so annoying! The only cases that provided a clean match were Matcha Godot and a Chinese version of the Epic Online Godot plugin. But they give both players a random ID, not the ID 1 to the host.
Can you offer what I need?
Thanks. Take a look at the state of my game YouTube.com/@NinjaMetalBlast

kuligs2

Johan_Lopes bruw, are you a codist? This is a simple thing to implement, even i, could do this.. sheesh..

The latest implementation of what you want is by some guy, but he uses Turn server written in typescript..

My example used the simple dpmaster type server implementation.. Eitheir way you will have to have a place for people to send their lobby data to a common server and then request other lobbies from that server.. once you get the data you can connect to each players lobby and run game p2p..

There is no way to everyone have lobbies without a masterlist server that keeps track on who opened lobby or not.
Here is the OG dpmaster "masterlist" server. Could be used as masterlist server.
https://github.com/bad-mushroom/dpmaster

Here is my godot implementation.. not the best but you can check how UDP packets travel
https://github.com/kuligs2/gdmaster
And my implementation of server browser.
https://github.com/kuligs2/gdmaster-server-browser

And that guy made similar, but he falsely advertises that this is TRUE p2p.. its not.. it still uses masterlist server that needs to get all the lobby information, and then you connect directly to peers once you get all the data..

https://github.com/jonandrewdavis/andoodev-godot-web-rtc-p2p

Johan_Lopes

kuligs2 Thanks bro! I'll check everything you mentioned. If all fails, can I hire you as programmer? lol

kuligs2

Johan_Lopes no hire, i dont have time and expertise to wok for a wage