Key Concepts
For a deeper dive into key concepts, refer to The Architecture of Catena blog post.
Catena is a source-available set of tools that is designed to help game developers build online games quickly and efficiently. With Catena, online features are interoperable, extensible, modular, easy to integrate with your game, and simple to run anywhere — even with limited backend experience.
Source Available
Unlike other platforms, Catena gives you access to its source code — which also means you are in charge of running it.
Don’t worry, this isn’t as scary as it sounds! You have several options for how to run Catena, and you can follow our guides to get set up in just a few minutes.
Since Catena is source available, you have the option to peel the curtain back and modify it to match the needs of your game. Catena handles the hard parts of implementing a game backend, and is designed in a similar manner to “engine code” you might find in Unreal Engine.
Catena provides out-of-the-box support for:
- Configuration management
- Structured logging
- Authentication and session management
- Network transport between clients and servers
- Network transport between Catena services
- Database interfaces
- Module/plugin registration
- Service discovery
Interoperable, Extensible, Modular
Catena is designed from the ground up to be interoperable, extensible, and modular. The “engine code” we provide is called “Catena Core”, which you will rarely need to touch or modify.
On top of Catena Core, we provide modular and interoperable plugins that can get you started with an array of common online features such as identity and access management, commerce, matchmaking, game server management, social features, and more.
Catena provides flexibility with regards to how these plugins can be used:
- You can use them just as they are — they are designed to work together out-of-the-box.
- They can easily be swapped out to interface with other popular backend service platforms (e.g. AWS GameLift) for certain portions of your backend.
- They can be replaced with custom plugins written entirely by you in order to meet your game’s specific needs.
Easy to Integrate With Your Game
Catena provides SDKs for Unity, Unreal, or Proprietary Game Engines.
Simple to Run Anywhere
You must run Catena yourself, but you have plenty of options for how to do that. It can be run as a modular monolith on your workstation, on a single bare metal machine, on a single VM in the cloud, or as a production grade distributed system with its modules broken up into microservices.
Get up and running in a few minutes with Getting Started: How to Run Catena.