2024 Year in review: release highlights from Talo

TL;DR

From game feedback and player authentication to events filtering, game channels and much more.

We've made Talo a more versatile experience for developers with feedback from the community.

2024 Overview

This year we publicly launched Talo with the goal of bringing an open source game backend to developers so they can set up player management, leaderboards and stats without having to take time away from building their games.

As the number of developers using Talo grew, we added new features and improvements to make the platform more powerful and user-friendly.

Here's a month-by-month breakdown of all our major updates:

June: Game feedback service

• Game feedback: Developers can now gather and manage feedback directly from players within their games. Talo Feedback makes it easier for developers to be proactive and engaged with their players.
• Feedback search: A powerful new search tool was added, making it easy to find and filter specific pieces of player feedback.
• Access key updates: Access key scopes can now be updated, giving developers granular control over what each key can do.

July: Player authentication

• Player authentication: A fully-managed player authentication system complete with registration, verification and account management. Talo Player Authentication is built with security and privacy in mind.
• Auth audit log: Track all changes and activities related to player authentication for better transparency and debugging.

August: Events performance and Continuity

• Events ClickHouse migration: We migrated the Events service to ClickHouse, resulting in faster query performance and improved scalability. If you're interested, you can learn more about why we chose ClickHouse and the process of migrating to it in our blog post.
• Continuity: We updated our Godot plugin and Unity package to add Continuity - a mechanism to replay failed network requests. Continuity ensures games don't drop any data, even if players are offline. Learn more about Continuity.

September: Steamworks auth and leaderboard entry props

• Deleting auth accounts: Players can now request to delete their authentication accounts.
• Steamworks auth: Support was added for Steamworks authentication, making it easier to integrate Talo with Steam games.
• Leaderboard entry props: Arbitrary properties can now be attached to leaderboard entries, providing additional context and flexibility.

October: Player group updates

• Pinned groups: Pin important player groups to the dashboard for a quick glance at the most important data.
• Player groups API: A new API was added allowing developers to manage player groups programmatically and to check group membership in-game.

November: Usability updates and showcase page

• Updating game names: Game names can now be updated directly from the dashboard.
• arm64 support for Docker images: Talo’s Docker images now support arm64, making it easier to deploy on devices like Raspberry Pi.
• Events filter: An enhanced filter for the Events overview now lets developers easily find the data they need and filter out distractions.
• Playground interactivity: The Talo Playground for both Godot and Unity has been made more interactive, improving the developer onboarding experience.
• Group stat values and leaderboard entry scores: Player groups can now filter on leaderboard scores and stat values for players.
• Showcase: Our new showcase page highlights games built with Talo. Submit your project and share it with our community.
• Unity 6 compatibility: Full support for Unity 6 ensures all Talo features work seamlessly with the latest Unity version.

December: Socket and Game Channels

• Talo Socket: The underlying architecture powering Game Channels, Talo Socket, is now available for developers to use in their Godot games.
• Game Channels: A new socket-based messaging system, allowing direct communication between players in real-time. Channels can be used for player chats, sending arbitrary JSON to various groups and pushing game updates directly to clients. Learn more about Game Channels here.

Looking ahead to 2025

As we enter 2025, we’re excited to continue building on the sockets work we started this month. We'll be extending Game Channels to support our Unity package and adding more admin functionality to the dashboard like creating channels, updating channels and deleting channels. We've already started adding more observability and analytics to socket events too.

Talo is shaped by developer feedback, so we’re always looking for ways to improve the platform to make building games faster.

Join us on Discord or GitHub to share your feedback and help shape the future of Talo.