Enhancing TerraQuest: A Scalable, High-Performance MMO Game with AWS and Nakama on Heroic Cloud

Introduction

In the rapidly evolving world of online gaming, providing a seamless and engaging player experience is crucial. TerraQuest, a 2D MMO game with integrated blockchain payment solutions, faced significant challenges in delivering a high-performance, low-latency experience to its global player base. This case study explores how we leveraged AWS services and Nakama on Heroic Cloud to overcome these challenges, resulting in a scalable, robust, and cost-effective solution.

Client Background

TerraQuest is a 2D MMO game that combines captivating gameplay with secure blockchain-based payment solutions. The game’s primary goal was to offer a global MMO experience, ensuring smooth game server performance and efficient content delivery to players worldwide.

Project Challenges

TerraQuest encountered several key challenges:

• High Latency: Providing low-latency gameplay to a global audience.
• Server Scalability: Managing game server performance to handle millions of concurrent players.
• Secure Transactions: Ensuring secure and efficient blockchain transactions.
• Operational Costs: Reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) while maintaining high performance.

Why Nakama and Heroic Cloud?

Nakama is an open-source, production-ready, cross-platform, scalable game server designed for real-time, multiplayer, and social games. It provides essential backend services such as groups, chat, friends lists, real-time multiplayer, and matchmaking APIs. Nakama was chosen for its robustness, scalability, and extensive features that accelerate game development and enhance monetization.

Heroic Cloud is a fully managed service available through the AWS Marketplace that hosts Nakama Enterprise. Heroic Cloud offers proprietary scaling technology, allowing games to automatically scale to millions of players without requiring code changes. It also includes multiple environments and continuous integration capabilities, making development, debugging, and scaling much easier. Heroic Cloud was selected for its seamless integration with AWS, scalability, and real-time monitoring capabilities.

Proposed Solution

To address these challenges, we implemented a comprehensive solution using AWS services and Nakama on Heroic Cloud.

Key Components

1. Amazon CloudFront: Utilized for global content delivery, reducing latency and ensuring fast, reliable game updates and dynamic content delivery.
2. Nakama on Heroic Cloud: Managed game server infrastructure providing real-time multiplayer and social game backend services. Heroic Cloud’s proprietary scaling technology allows the game to automatically scale to millions of players.
3. Amazon RDS: Used for managing game databases with automated backups, scaling, and high availability.
4. Amazon S3: Storing game assets, logs, backups, and delivering the web version of the game, downloadable game client, and websites.
5. Amazon CloudWatch: Monitoring the performance and health of the infrastructure.

Architectural Diagram

Implementation Steps

1. Assessment and Planning: Conducted a thorough assessment of TerraQuest’s requirements and existing infrastructure.
2. Architecture Design: Designed a scalable and robust architecture leveraging AWS services and Nakama on Heroic Cloud.
3. Migration and Integration: Migrated dynamic content and player data to Amazon S3, deployed game servers using Nakama on Heroic Cloud, and integrated the blockchain payment system.
4. Optimization and Testing: Conducted extensive testing to ensure performance and reliability, optimized CloudFront settings for low latency and high availability.
5. Deployment and Monitoring: Deployed the solution in production and used Amazon CloudWatch for continuous monitoring and performance insights.

Outcomes and Success Metrics

The implementation of this solution resulted in significant improvements:

1. Reduced Latency: Achieved a 40% reduction in latency, enhancing the gameplay experience for players worldwide.
2. Increased Availability and Scalability: Maintained 99.99% uptime for game servers and scaled to handle up to 1 million concurrent players seamlessly.
3. Cost Efficiency: Reduced operational costs significantly, leading to annual savings of $76,800.
4. Improved User Experience: Higher player satisfaction and retention due to improved game performance and faster content delivery.

Lessons Learned

1. Importance of Scalability: Leveraging Heroic Cloud’s scaling technology allowed for automatic scaling to millions of players without code changes, demonstrating the critical importance of having a scalable infrastructure.
2. Cost Management: Migrating to a managed solution on Heroic Cloud significantly reduced operational costs, underscoring the value of managed services in lowering TCO.
3. Performance Optimization: Utilizing Amazon CloudFront for content delivery drastically improved global performance and reduced latency, highlighting the importance of optimizing content delivery networks.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, TerraQuest plans to leverage more AWS services to further enhance its gaming infrastructure. Potential upgrades include integrating advanced analytics to gain deeper insights into player behavior and exploring additional security measures to safeguard player data.

Conclusion

By leveraging AWS services and Nakama on Heroic Cloud, TerraQuest successfully overcame its challenges, providing a superior gaming experience to its global player base. This case study underscores the value of scalable, high-performance infrastructure in the gaming industry, demonstrating how cutting-edge technology can enhance both performance and cost efficiency.

Stay tuned to Skybit Blog for more insights and case studies on leveraging cloud solutions to drive business success.