Retool
Introduction
Over the past 10 years developing game backends for our customers we are commonly asked to advise on solutions or products that can help with game teams with live-ops, player management, customer support and game development.
While many requirements, such as player searching and profile editing, are similar across all games, we sometimes come across some very interesting challenges specific to a particular game’s needs or something out of the ordinary that our customers want to experiment with.
The challenge when it comes to building these dashboards is not always in how we can build out modular UI which is secure, responsive and intuitive to our customer’s needs, but often there is a technological overhead in creating pipelines for deployment and building custom back-office tools using React or Vue.
Back in 2021 SuperNimbus was involved in helping AWS GameTech with finding new homes for 100’s of live GameSparks titles.
The GameSparks platform came with its own suite of tools for creating back-office tools using JavaScript and HTML. Inevitably, these tools needed to be migrated along with the backend code and the frontend SDKs for the new platforms these games were going to run on. Because each one of these games came with its own complications and importantly, time-constraints, we needed to look at a more efficient way of replicating the functionality of these back-office tools.
We had worked with Retool on a previous project where the GameSparks “manage-screens” feature was limiting the customer’s aspiration for their back-office suite. For these GameSparks migrations, Retool excelled in terms of its ease of use, modularity and reusability of custom-components, security and learning curve.
Retool Overview
For SuperNimbus, Retool has become our principal recommendation for our game customers interested in building a custom back-office suite. Its flexibility means that we rarely encounter a feature-request which we cannot deliver, and its ease-of-use means that we can get prototypes and final products up and running much faster than building these tools from scratch. For us, and our customers, rapid-prototyping and faster development means we spend more time on what really challenges us, and shorter development times means we can pass those savings onto our customers.
Therefore, we have decided to share some of the most common use-cases we get for these live-ops and back-office tools and how they can be implemented with Retool.
You can see a live demo of this Retool app here. Each of the feature in this demo app will be explained throughout this guide.
Player Info Dashboards
The most common type of back-office tools we are asked to create for our customers are player dashboards.
These tools are used to search for players who might have reported issues to customer support. Customer support can use these tools to find players by Id or email address, check out their account or transactions for anomalies and credit the player points, gold or grant them items in order to resolve the case.
For this tutorial we are going to cover the following features that make up one of these dashboards:
- Listing, Searching & Filtering Players
- Viewing Account Data
- Updating Player Data
- Implementing Advanced Retool Features
- Integrating Retool with 3rd Party Backend Servers
Tutorial Structure
Over the course of this tutorial we will create a Retool application, add player data to the Retool database and implement the player info dashboard features.
We will then explore some advanced Retool features such as pagination, modules and workflows.
Finally, in a separate application we will show how Retool can be integrated with AWS Lambda and BrainCloud.