Introducing Winter Starfall: A Demo Game from the PlayFab Team

We’re excited to share the release of a new game from the PlayFab team, Winter Starfall! If you enjoyed our previous demo game, Vanguard Outrider, you’re in for a treat. Winter Starfall brings a fresh story to life, showcasing the latest  PlayFab features like Economy V2, CloudScript using Azure Functions, and some new features that aim to give you a deeper look into how PlayFab functions in a live game. These new demo features include a real-time feed of API calls as you play the game, and the ability to view the production title in Game Manager, our developer portal. This allows you to see real data aggregating in a title, providing a comprehensive understanding of PlayFab’s capabilities.

We designed Winter Starfall to make it easier for game creators to see how PlayFab works and to get a hands-on feel for developing with our service. To support this, we’ve made the source code available on GitHub for those who want to dive deeper. Alongside the source code is new documentation that walks you through the login and purchase flows in Winter Starfall, demonstrating best practices for these scenarios.

Winter Starfall uses the PlayFab SDKs to implement the following features:

• Core PlayFab functions – Showcasing best practices for Player authentication and the use of Player data and Title data to configure objects and resources in the game.
• Economy V2  – Our new economy system which powers the store and inventory system in the game.
• CloudScript using Azure Functions – Serverless compute on demand powered by Azure Functions used to implement custom server-side functionality. Check out how we combined it with the economy system to enable a resell flow for in-game items in the [tutorial documentation] (source code and scenarios.md).
• Title news – A feature for title-wide communication to inform players of gameplay tips and notices.

We hope you enjoy exploring Winter Starfall and discovering how PlayFab can enhance your game development experience.

Check it out!

Try out Winter Starfall and check out the documentation for a deeper dive into how different features have been integrated with the game.

You can also find Winter Starfall along with our legacy demo Vanguard Outrider in Game Manager on the My Studios & Titles page.

To help us help game developers even more, we’d love to hear about your experiences, feedback, and suggestions in the PlayFab community on Discord.