Quickstart

This gets you from a new game to a formed match. It assumes you have signed up; the free tier is enough for everything here.

1. Get a token

In the portal, create an API credential for your game. It is shown once. Store it in your secret manager now, because it cannot be retrieved again, only replaced.

2. Create a queue

Create a queue with this configuration. It is the smallest thing that will match anything:

version: 1
queue_id: acme.smoketest
name: Smoke Test
rulesets:
  - ruleset_id: default
    engine_id: nemesis
    params:
      team_size: { start: 5, end: 5 }
      team_count: { start: 2, end: 2 }

Ten players, two teams of five. Everything else takes a default: skill matching is on, latency scoring is off, and no attribute filtering happens. Change queue_id to something in your own namespace. Dot-separated is the convention, and it groups your queues together.

3. Submit a ticket

One ticket is one player or one party. This is a single player:

grpcurl -H 'Authorization: Bearer <token>' -d '{
  "ticket": {
    "id": "3f2b8c1e-9a4d-4f7b-8e11-2c5d6a7b8c90",
    "queue_id": "acme.smoketest",
    "ruleset_ids": ["default"],
    "engine_input": "<base64 nemesis EngineInput>"
  }
}' match.ivk.dev:443 matchmaker.core.v1.MatchmakerService/CreateTicket

engine_input is a serialized matchmaker.engines.nemesis.v1.EngineInput, base64-encoded. That is the awkward part of calling the API by hand, and it is why the .NET SDK exists. It packs the payload for you:

EngineInput = Nemesis.PackInput(new EngineInput
{
    Players = { new Player { PlayerId = "alice", Mmr = 0.55 } },
})

The call returns as soon as the ticket is durably queued. That is not a match yet.

4. Submit nine more

A 5v5 ruleset needs ten players, and the engine will not form a match until it has them. Submit nine more tickets with different UUIDs and varying mmr values.

Reusing an ID is not an error, since that is how retries stay safe, but it will not add a second player to the pool. Ten calls with the same ID leave you with one ticket and no match.

5. Watch the match form

Within a tick or two of the tenth ticket, the engine forms a match and emits a match.created outcome carrying the match ID, every ticket, and the teams the engine chose.

What you just did, and what is missing

You submitted tickets and the engine matched them. A real integration adds four things:

Next	Why
Core Concepts	The model behind what you just did: pools, ticks, commitments
Integration Flow	The full sequence, including provisioning and notifying players
Queue Configuration	Latency budgets, skill tolerance, crossplay rules
Production Checklist	The failure cases you have not handled yet

Start with this: a formed match is a commitment. Those ten players have left the pool and are counting on your backend to put them in a game. The integration flow covers what that obliges you to do.