Tools and setup
Even the best live ops teams will have a hard time running their game without the help of efficient tooling and bullet-proof infrastructure. Let’s run through the basics.
Content management system (CMS)
The CMS encapsulates any tooling that empowers designers, live ops managers, and any other non-programmers to create, change, and deploy game content.
From game and level editors to bespoke configuration tools, config files, and online spreadsheets, the fate of your CMS will depend on your game engine and data architecture. Live ops tooling cannot be an afterthought, so make sure to communicate your content management intentions early and request any tools you may need throughout production.
With a well-integrated CMS, editing files is quick, error-free, and well-visualized. Moreover, deploying new balancing tweaks, levels, missions, events, localization files, items, and so on should be done in the CMS alone and require no new game code.
New graphical...
