Nightward production servers online

Up to now, Nightward’s servers have only ever run on a development machine — fine for building the game, but not something the world could actually live on. This stretch changed that: the production servers are now online, running the full game the way it will run for real.

To be clear, this isn’t a launch — Nightward isn’t open to players yet. It’s the foundation that has to come first.

The servers are up

There’s now a proper, always-on production environment running every part of the game: the gateway players connect through, the world and all its facets, the character service, and the database. It’s stable and it stays up on its own.

Updates deploy themselves

What matters most for how quickly Nightward can improve is that updates no longer go out by hand. We built a full continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipeline: when a change is finished it’s automatically packaged into a versioned build, and deploying it to the servers is a single step that updates the database and switches everything over to the new version in the right order.

There are no manual commands to get wrong. Every deploy runs identically, a failure stops safely instead of leaving things half-updated, and going back to a previous version is quick — the kind of reliability that needs to be in place before real players ever depend on it.

A secure connection

The servers are reachable only over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection, so logins and game traffic are never sent in the open. The certificate that secures it renews automatically, with nothing to maintain by hand.

While we were in there

• The world-building tools now live with the game. The editor we use to make maps, monsters, items, and quests used to be a separate project; it’s now part of the main one — setting up for outside content contributions down the line.
• The client connects securely on its own, choosing the encrypted connection for the production servers and a plain one for local testing.