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Backflip Studios scales mobile games with Google Cloud Platform
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from Dale Thoms, co-founder and CTO of
Backflip Studios
, the mobile game development studio. The company is behind popular titles such as DragonVale, Paper Toss and Ninjump, and has grown from three to over 100 employees in the past five years.
In the fast changing mobile games market, speed of development is critical. We need to launch games quickly, but more importantly, we need to release frequent updates to existing games so that players keep coming back. In 2009 when we started the company, most mobile games had very little server infrastructure behind them if at all. But over time games have grown to include frequent content updates, cross-device play, community events, player communication via ads, push notifications and sophisticated data analysis. Now it is crucial to have a server infrastructure that can handle all of that and more.
Google Cloud Platform
gives us the peace of mind that comes from not having to worry about setting up and managing servers, or having a dedicated server engineer to ensure systems never go down. We wish downtime and latency issues didn't exist, but when it happens it's comforting to know Google will take care of them. We started by building our games’ server components on
Google App Engine
, but now, our code uses other elements of Cloud Platform, namely
Google BigQuery
and
Google Cloud Storage
.
Autoscaling is critical to our business because we can't predict when our games will be featured on an app store or review site, and we wind up with a giant influx of new users. What we can predict is that whenever we push a new update to a game like DragonVale, users come back to the game in droves, doubling or even tripling, normal traffic volume over the span of a few minutes. With App Engine in the background, we’ve been able to scale smoothly to meet every spike in demand. Best of all, we only pay for the capacity our application uses.
We’re also very data-driven and frequently do analysis against data we’ve collected. Our games live in App Engine and Datastore, where a player’s game state (player level, dragons owned, placement of items on islands, etc.) is stored in a format optimized for use by our game engine. In order for our marketing and analytics teams to make use of the data, we need to pull it into a system that they can run queries against.
Initially, we were pulling data into an in-house SQL database, but when BigQuery became available, we switched as it imported data and ran queries many times faster than the previous SQL database. We now pull data out of Datastore and transform it via MapReduce from the game engine optimized format into a more traditional database form. The analytics team can then run queries in BigQuery to analyze what players are doing. With these insights, we can figure out areas where players are struggling, that need improvement -- what new features and content to offer, how to better retain players, etc. -- to keep them coming back.
We evaluated other vendors’ cloud-based solutions, but we would have had to build additional services to get all the functionality we needed. In comparison, Cloud Platform took on a lot of the burden, freeing up our developers to focus on actual game development, and the ramp on App Engine was fast thanks to its simple architecture. Our engineering department was pleasantly surprised that all they needed to do was to write the application logic, and all the database, server and scaling components were taken care of for them.
The initial team creating DragonVale was fairly small, and we had only one developer building most of the server backend for the game. Yet, it took only six months from start to finish. If we didn't have Cloud Platform, we would have likely needed a larger team to work on the database and other components, which would have extended the development cycle.
Each game rollout is easier and faster than the previous one as we get better on Cloud Platform. We have several new games coming out this summer, all of which utilize Cloud Platform. We couldn’t move at anything close to this pace without the services provided by Cloud Platform, and thanks to Google, we can make games faster and sleep better at night knowing our infrastructure is in good hands.
-Contributed by Dale Thoms, co-founder and CTO, Backflip Studios
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