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Intro

Bullieverse partnered with Revolgy to address multiplayer, matchmaking, and game analytics for Necrodemic. The goal was to lower costs, provide low‑latency multiplayer globally, enhance security, prevent cheating, and scale elastically.

About the client

Bullieverse is a game development company focused on progressive games, combining an NFTs marketplace with immersive 3D experience and social interactions — a Web3‑native world of games, art, and digital social experiences. Necrodemic is its second game, a free‑to‑play survival game where players combat zombie bears to earn essence for weapons and perks. It features procedurally generated maps and random enemy spawns. Strategy matters: diverse enemy types with unique abilities require players to improve character capabilities, buy perks, and adapt.

Challenge

Bullieverse needed to:

• Lower total cost of ownership when serving massive multiplayer games
• Provide multiplayer globally with low latency
• Enhance the security of the games and underlying infrastructure
• Support online multiplayer worldwide in a cost‑effective, elastic way
• Eliminate cheating (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, Bullieverse

Solution

Revolgy designed and implemented an extension to the existing infrastructure, keeping core game services the same and adding new capabilities. The team used the AWS Well‑Architected Framework and Revolgy’s best practices.

• Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD
  
  • Bullieverse used Serverless Framework for IaC of Lambda functions, API Gateways, and other services.
  • Integrated Terraform for shared infrastructure while allowing Terraform and Serverless Framework to work together with minimal adjustments to the Apps CI/CD process.

• Multiplayer and scaling
  
  • Created an online multiplayer environment using Amazon GameLift multi‑location fleets.
  • Used a mix of on‑demand and spot instances to improve elasticity and reduce costs.

• Security and anti‑cheat
  
  • Improved security to resist DDoS and other external attacks.
  • Added features to help prevent cheating, including the ability to correlate scores and wallets.

• Analytics and data platform
  
  • Consolidated existing disparate data and expanded with new data sources into a data‑warehouse solution to provide unified, end‑to‑end insights.
  • Game analytics design to track retention (e.g., number of tournaments played by week), number of active players, and players’ earnings and spending.
  • Data flow: capture important game data and process it into Amazon Redshift; build dashboards, storyboards, and charts in Amazon QuickSight to track business metrics, issues, and alerts.
  • Integrated internal sources (Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Aurora) and external sources (Google Analytics and Alchemy).

• Monitoring
  
  • Used GameLift’s monitoring features to track server health, monitor player activity and behavior, and identify issues and trends that impact gameplay.

“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, Bullieverse

Results

• Lower costs (especially during times with more players) by scaling up and down on demand
• Low‑latency multiplayer available globally
• Improved security against DDoS and external attacks
• Anti‑cheat features in place (including correlating scores and wallets)
• Increased elasticity, performance, and scalability with GameLift multi‑location fleets and on‑demand/spot instances
• Unified analytics with Redshift and QuickSight; insights into retention, active players, earnings and spending
• Better overall reliability and gaming experience

Collaboration highlight

The teams met in person at GDC in March 2023 while the design proposal was delivered and implementation was underway. Revolgy’s Cloud Engineer tried Necrodemic first‑hand, which informed the cooperation.