Launching a brand-new online game is like an adrenaline rush — you’re excited about reaching players worldwide, but there’s also that feeling of stress and uncertainty.
To make their game stand out in the online gaming world, Bullieverse found a reliable partner in Revolgy to tackle the tricky parts of multiplayer, matchmaking, and game analytics. In this case study, we’ll explore how this collaboration turned those challenges into a successful gaming experience.
Survival thrills with Necrodemic’s zombie bears
A game development company focusing on progressive games, Bullieverse incorporates the NFTs marketplace with immersive 3D experience and social interactions. It’s a Web3-native world of games, art, and various digital social experiences.
Necrodemic is Bullieverse’s second game to come out, and it’s a free-to-play survival thriller game where players combat zombie bears to earn essence for powerful weapons and perks. It offers procedurally generated maps and random enemy spawns, enhancing replayability.
Unlike typical zombie shooters, strategy in Necrodemic is crucial. The diverse enemy types with unique abilities force players to strategize as their actions impact the outcome. To survive, players must improve their character’s capabilities, buy perks, and adapt to a dynamic game environment.
“Collaborating with Revolgy was a smart move for Bullieverse. Their solution has not only streamlined our gaming experience but also bolstered our security measures, ensuring a safe environment for our players. Their team’s deep understanding of our needs and their dedication to delivering results has made this partnership a true success.”
— Srini Anala, Founder at Bullieverse
The main challenges Bullieverse faced
Bullieverse needed to lower the cost of running their game servers, provide multiplayer games globally with low latency, enhance the security of their games and the underlying infrastructure, and support online multiplayer mode for users around the world in a cost-effective and elastic way.
Revolgy designed and implemented a new AWS infrastructure solution that addressed all of Bullieverse’s challenges. These challenges included:
- Lowering the TCO when serving massive multiplayer games: As the number of users increases, the cost of running the game servers can also increase.
- Providing multiplayer games globally with low latency: Gamers want to be able to play their favorite games with low latency, regardless of where they are in the world.
- Enhancing the security of the games and the underlying infrastructure: Games and their underlying infrastructure are often targets of cyberattacks. Bullieverse needed to ensure that its games and infrastructure were secure from attack.
- Supporting online multiplayer mode of gamers around the world in a cost-effective and elastic way: Bullieverse needed to be able to support a large number of players from all over the world in a cost-effective and scalable way.
- Eliminating cheating: Bullieverse was facing a problem with cheating in its games. The new infrastructure includes a number of features that help to prevent cheating, such as anti-cheating mechanisms and the ability to correlate scores and wallets.
“Before partnering with Revolgy, Necrodemic had its fair share of challenges. For one, we struggled to offer a seamless online multiplayer mode for gamers around the world. Revolgy’s solution tackled these challenges head-on and transformed our gaming landscape.”
— Srini Anala, Founder at Bullieverse
Revolgy’s tailored infrastructure solution
Coming to us with a project, Bullieverse was originally using Serverless Framework for the IaC of their lambda functions, API Gateways, and some other services. The goal was to integrate Terraform for shared infrastructure while allowing Terraform and Serverless Framework to work together, ensuring minimal adjustments to the Apps CI/CD process.
Revolgy aimed to design an extension to the existing Bullieverse infrastructure, i.e. keeping the core game services the same and adding new features. We have utilized AWS Well Architected Framework and Revolgy’s best practices to deliver a tailored and flexible infrastructure solution.
The solution has improved security, making it resistant to DDoS and other external attacks and preventing cheating hacks. It has helped increase the elasticity, performance, and scalability of the game, and created an online multiplayer environment with GameLift multi-location fleets and on-demand and spot instances.
In addition, we have consolidated the existing disparate data and expanded them with new data sources into the DWH solution to provide unified end-to-end insights.
Moreover, the solution has decreased the costs, especially during the times when the number of gamers rises.
New game analytics provides insights into user behavior
An online game such as Necrodemic needs to gain insights into user behavior and improve the game performance. Revolgy has designed a game analytics solution that would allow Bullieverse to continuously track the “health” of their game, including retention (number of tournaments played by users by week), number of active players, tracking player’s earnings and spending, and others.
The design goal is to capture important game data, process it into a data warehouse (Redshift), and then use it to create dashboards, storyboards, and charts (Quicksight) to track business metrics, issues, and alerts. This will involve integrating both internal data sources (Kinesis, Aurora) and external sources like Google Analytics and Alchemy.
GameLift provides robust monitoring features, empowering game developers to analyze game server performance in real time. By using GameLift, developers can track server health, monitor player activity and behavior, and pinpoint issues and trends that impact gameplay. This data becomes instrumental in optimizing game performance, enhancing player experience, and boosting player retention.
“Revolgy’s solution was a game-changer for Bullieverse. Their expertise in crafting an innovative and tailored infrastructure perfectly met our needs. With their support, we’ve improved Necrodemic’s gaming experience, achieving outstanding results in multiplayer functionality, security, and analytics. They’ve been an essential partner in our journey towards creating a top-notch gaming world.”
— Srini Anala, Founder at Bullieverse
One of the biggest benefits of the new infrastructure has been the ability to scale up and down on demand. This has allowed Bullieverse to save money when there are fewer players online and to ensure that there are always enough servers available when there are more players online.
Bullieverse is now able to provide a better gaming experience for its players, regardless of where they are in the world. The new infrastructure is also more secure and reliable, which helps to protect Bullieverse's games and its players.
Read also: Virtual Game Studio in the cloud
Meeting the Bullieverse team in person
As a remote-first, global service provider, the Revolgy team doesn’t always get to meet our customers in person. However, we had the opportunity to meet Bullieverse’s team at GDC, the top event for the game industry, fostering game developers and their skills.
Taking place in March 2023, Revolgy had already delivered the design proposal and was implementing the new infrastructure. Our Cloud Engineering Martin Růžička had the chance to try out playing Necrodemic first-hand with Bullieverse’s team.
“Trying out the game right there and then with the game developers was definitely a lot of fun for me. I learned a lot about the game itself, the idea behind it, and future plans. Meeting the Bullieverse team has given me a whole new perspective on the game and our cooperation.”
— Martin Růžička, Cloud Engineer at Revolgy
Conclusion
The collaboration between Bullieverse and Revolgy has successfully tackled the challenges of multiplayer, matchmaking, and game analytics for Necrodemic. By implementing a tailored and flexible AWS infrastructure solution, they have significantly reduced the total cost of ownership, provided low-latency multiplayer gaming on a global scale, and enhanced security.
Do you want to learn more about how Revolgy can help you migrate to the cloud? Read our blog and case studies, or contact us for a free consultation.
