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Real-time Parties

Real-time parties is a great way to add team play to a game, enabling users to form a party and communicate with party members.

A party is a group of users who’ve gathered together to participate in some kind of gameplay or social gathering. Any user can create a party and will become the initial party leader. Users can invite other players to join or can mark the party as private so other players must request to join. A leader is always required and selected from players who are currently connected when the current leader leaves. When all players leave the party it’s gone.

A very common LayerG-supported use case for parties is to matchmake together in groups. This suits gameplay where users collaborate in squads, or where players compete in team battles. The matchmaker can be passed a party ID which instructs the matching logic to ensure that enough capacity is reserved to join the match altogether.

Parties differ from the groups feature because they’re not designed to exist between play sessions when the user goes offline. A party only exists as long as at least one user is in it. You should use groups if you want to create guild systems or other gameplay which should exist as a persistent entity in your game or apps.

Create party​

A party can be created by any user. You can limit the max number of users allowed in the party (up to 256) and whether a party member must wait for approval from the leader before they can join. A party is also created with state which can be modified by the party leader.

You can create rules on which users can create parties in your game with before hooks using runtime code.

Find party​

After creating a new party, there’s many ways for the party ID to be shared with other users to enable them to find and join:

The way you combine these features of the server to power your game design can create wonderful social mechanics to bring users together and create a deep and meaningful player community.

With the party ID, users can then join the party.

Join party​

A user must join a party before they can send messages, see the member list, or invite other users.

If the party is private, users can request to join and the party leader can accept or reject.

Leave party​

A user can leave a party at any time. The user will also be automatically removed from the party if they disconnect from the server.

Party leader rotation​

When a user leaves the server will check whether they are the current party leader and, if they were, send a message to indicate the leader has left and which member was promoted as the new party leader.

When an automated promotion happens the leader chosen will always be the user who has been part of the party for the longest since it was created. This is a deterministic process and cannot be changed. See manual leader promotion if your game needs different criteria to promote a new leader.

Send messages​

Any user who is a party member can send messages to the party containing: text, emotes, or game specific actions.

Manual leader promotion​

As well as regular messages the party leader can also send a special promotion message which will declare that they’ve stepped down as the current leader and who they have promoted to the new leader.

Close party​

A party cannot be closed by any member other than the party leader. The party leader can also eject all party members, which will close the party and clear its state on the server. In most cases it’s more useful from a game design perspective to allow the leader to leave.

Best practices​

We recommend you don’t use parties to implement multiplayer game logic or use it for scenarios where the messages sent to the party members is intended to drive gameplay progression. In these cases it’s better to use the authoritative multiplayer engine in the game server. This gives you complete control over your multiplayer net code and the logic associated with actions taken by users.