Orchestrating Success: Integrating Hathora with Pragma’s Sample Game ‘Zenith Heroes’

Game studios today face a rapidly evolving landscape, where delivering seamless multiplayer experiences and scaling infrastructure efficiently are crucial for success. Server orchestration, the ability to deploy, manage, and scale dedicated game servers, has become a cornerstone for modern game development. This is where Hathora and Pragma come together, offering a powerful, integrated solution that streamlines server management and empowers studios to focus on gameplay innovation rather than backend complexity.

In this blog, we explore how the integration of Hathora’s advanced server orchestration platform with Pragma’s backend technology has been implemented in Pragma’s sample game, Zenith Heroes. This collaboration serves as a practical reference for studios aiming to accelerate their deployment pipelines, reduce operational overhead, and deliver robust multiplayer experiences. Whether you’re launching your first title or scaling a live service game, the combined strengths of Hathora and Pragma can help you orchestrate success with confidence.

Zenith Heroes Sample Game Overview

Zenith Heroes is a sample game developed by the Pragma team to experience their own platform from a customer’s perspective. By building and operating Zenith Heroes, Pragma ensures that their technology is not only developer-friendly but also battle-tested in real-world scenarios.

Zenith Heroes incorporates many of the features and challenges found in live service games, such as matchmaking, party systems, persistent progression, and scalable multiplayer sessions. This makes it an invaluable reference for studios seeking to implement similar features or extend Pragma’s capabilities. Through Zenith Heroes, Pragma provides potential customers with a blueprint for best practices, integrations, and extensibility, altogether helping teams accelerate their own development cycles with confidence.

When developing Zenith Heroes, Pragma knew that a simple, streamlined server orchestration solution would be important both for development velocity and also as an ideal sample for customers to follow. Pragma developed the bulk of Zenith heroes during a team-wide hackathon, and Hathora sent an engineer to help.

Value of Hathora Server Orchestration

Real-time metrics for a game server running on Hathora

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  Ease of Setup: Hathora is designed with developer experience at its core. Setting up server orchestration is straightforward, with intuitive interfaces and comprehensive documentation guiding users from initial configuration to live deployment. Whether you’re spinning up a development environment or preparing for a global launch, Hathora’s platform minimizes friction and accelerates time-to-market.
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  Flexibility and Customization: One of Hathora’s standout features is its flexibility. Studios can easily customize runtime environments across development, testing, and production stages. This adaptability ensures that teams can iterate quickly during development while maintaining stability and performance in production. Hathora supports a variety of deployment strategies, allowing teams to fine-tune scaling policies, resource allocation, and network configurations to meet the specific needs of their game.
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  Hybrid Infrastructure: Bare Metal + Cloud: A true game changer is Hathora’s hybrid offering, seamlessly combining bare metal and cloud capacity. This hybrid approach delivers both cost efficiency and operational simplicity. Studios can optimize for performance and budget by leveraging bare metal servers for predictable workloads and bursting into the cloud during peak demand. This flexibility ensures that games remain responsive and cost-effective, regardless of player volume or geographic distribution.

Live fleet capacity metrics showcasing Hathora’s elastic metal (bare metal + cloud burst)

Seamless Integration with Pragma

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  Streamlined Workflow: Integrating Hathora with Pragma’s backend is a seamless process, thanks to a ready-to-use plugin that bridges the two platforms. This plugin enables studios to scale game servers directly from their Pragma backend, simplifying orchestration and reducing manual intervention. Some studios currently using this setup include Omeda Studios’ Predecessor and Frost Giant’s Stormgate among a number of others that we cannot share just yet. 
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  Unified Monitoring: Operational visibility is critical for live games. With Hathora and Pragma, studios can combine metrics from both platforms into a single Grafana dashboard. This unified view allows teams to monitor server health, player activity, and backend performance in real time, enabling rapid response to issues and data-driven optimization.
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  Technical Insights: The integration leverages the Hathora Server Orchestration Plugin, which handles server lifecycle management, scaling triggers, and health checks. This plugin is designed for extensibility, allowing studios to tailor orchestration policies to their unique requirements. The technical documentation provides clear guidance on setup, configuration, and best practices, ensuring that teams can implement robust integrations with minimal friction.

Deploying Servers with Hathora and Managing Multiplayer Features

Deploying servers with Hathora is efficient and developer-friendly. The process typically involves:

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  Server Build Creation: Package your game server and upload it to Hathora’s platform.
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  Deployment Configuration: Define deployment parameters, such as target regions, scaling policies, and resource limits.
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  CI/CD Integration: Use Hathora’s CLI to automate deployments within your CI pipeline (compatible with TeamCity, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and more). This automation ensures that new builds are tested and deployed rapidly, reducing downtime and manual effort.

Hathora’s flexible deployment options allow studios to roll out updates incrementally, manage blue-green deployments, and quickly roll back changes if needed.

Multiplayer Integration with Pragma

Pragma provides a robust suite of multiplayer features that are fully utilized in Zenith Heroes. Key capabilities include:

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  Party Systems: Players can form parties and coordinate before entering game sessions.
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  Session Management: Pragma handles session creation, matchmaking, and connection brokering, ensuring that players are matched efficiently and can join games with minimal latency.
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  Scalable Architecture: The integration with Hathora ensures that server resources scale dynamically based on player demand, maintaining performance and stability during peak times.

By combining Pragma’s multiplayer backend with Hathora’s orchestration, Zenith Heroes demonstrates how studios can deliver seamless multiplayer experiences without the operational headaches traditionally associated with server management.

Getting Started with Pragma and Hathora

Ready to elevate your game’s infrastructure? Getting started with Pragma and Hathora is straightforward:

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  Sign Up: Register for accounts on both platforms.
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  Follow the Guides: Both Pragma and Hathora offer detailed onboarding guides, sample projects, and API documentation to help you integrate quickly.
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  Trial Process: Take advantage of a combined trial to evaluate both platforms in your own development environment. Experiment with deploying servers, integrating multiplayer features, and monitoring performance, all before committing to a full rollout.

You can checkout the Hathora Docs right here!

Conclusion

The integration of Hathora and Pragma, as showcased in Zenith Heroes and battle-tested in multiple live titles, represents a new standard for server orchestration and multiplayer backend solutions. By combining ease of use, flexibility, and robust integration, these platforms empower studios to focus on what matters most: creating unforgettable gaming experiences.

If you’re ready to streamline your server operations, scale effortlessly, and deliver world-class multiplayer features, now is the time to explore what Hathora and Pragma can do for your next project!