How to Deploy a Unity Game into AWS GameLift Servers for the Ultimate in Scaling

Deploying Unity games into Amazon’s GameLift Servers technology always seems scary. There’s a lot going on for running a multiplayer game on a server and adding fleets, and management, and deployment into the cloud just adds to the fear factor.

But fear not! In this video Finn Hawkins, one of our Code Wizards engineers, shares a clear and practical walkthrough on deploying a Unity game server to AWS Game Lift.

If you’re working with multiplayer games and want to understand the full deployment pipeline—from Unity build to running on GameLift—this tutorial covers it step by step.

🔧 What’s inside:
✅ Preparing your Unity server build
✅ Setting up AWS GameLift
✅ Uploading and deploying your server

By the time you’ve finished you’ll be competent to understand how to use GameLift and how to run games upon it. What are you waiting for? Get involved 🙂

Some helpful pointers for what’s in the unity on gamelift video

Prerequisites [00:10]:

• Downloading and unzipping the Unity Gamelift plugin [00:10].
• Setting up the AWS CLI on your machine [00:29].
• Installing third-party DLLs by adding a NuGet scoped registry to your Unity project [00:48].
• Adding the GameLift server tarball to your Unity project via the Package Manager [01:38].

Implementing the Server Code [01:56]:

• Creating a server script in Unity and attaching it to an empty game object [02:02].
• Initializing the SDK and setting up ProcessParameters including callbacks for OnGameSession [02:48], OnUpdateGameSession [03:08], OnProcessTerminate [03:21], and OnHealthCheck [03:32].
• Calling ProcessReady to inform GameLift that the server is ready [04:13].
• Resetting the connection to the GameLift agent by calling the destroy function when the application closes [04:35].

Building the Server [04:48]:

• Ensuring the Unity project name does not have spaces [04:48].
• Setting the target server platform and architecture in Unity’s build settings (e.g., Windows build) [05:02].

Uploading the Build to AWS [05:16]:

• Using the AWS CLI tool with the upload build command, specifying parameters like the operating system, server SDK version, build route, build name, and region [05:25].

Creating a Managed EC2 Fleet [05:56]:

• Navigating to the GameLift console in AWS and selecting “Create managed EC2 fleet” [06:05].
• Adding fleet details, choosing the uploaded build, and configuring instance types [06:13].
• Setting up the launch path in the runtime configuration (e.g., gamelift unity sample.exe) [06:33].
• Reviewing all options and submitting to spin up the fleet [06:55].