At Next Games we are constantly looking
into new ways of creating game play.
We know that with the great success
of the "Walking Dead: No Man's Land"
that's definitely no
easy task to take over.
So the natural conclusion was that
we need to look into augmented
reality and location-based games.
So we created the "The
Walking Dead: Our World"
where you can play with your friends
and interact with the real world.
It's amazing: You can see the
walkers being part of the real life.
Entering the location-based games
we had to rethink our backend system
and move from the cloud services
classic architecture to the
Microsoft Azure Service Fabric.
Service Fabric gives us the
agility we need to operate
our games on a global scale,
instead of managing servers we
can just run our services and
scale them the way we want.
When we are working with big
names like the "Walking Dead"
it's really hard to predict how
many players will join the game.
So we just test the system before the
launch to the max and see if it breaks.
If it ever will break.
Actually I don't really know
with how many hundreds of servers
we will be launching the game
or which datacenters
will be providing first.
But then again on scalability
- why would I care?
It's all in cloud. It just scales.
As a matter of fact performance is
extremely important in location-based
games because you are moving around.
And on top of that instead of
being limited to levels the
whole planet is your playground.
Augmented reality and location-based games
are very heavy on the devices.
To make interaction faster and more
reliable we take everything out of the
device and put it on the server side.
This way the players can enjoy
the breathtaking game play.
When it comes to microservices
it's the combination that matters.
We are using Cosmos DB as
a geo-replicated database
to store the information of
our players and locate them.
We are using Service Fabric
to orchestrate and handle the
messaging between the services
and with Azure Functions we can even
dynamically inject events into the game,
say for example we detect
players in one specific location
we can send more walkers
there almost in real-time.
It's a new world out there.
When you are creating cross platform games
with iOS and Android as your devices,
with Augmented reality,
using Azure as your backend,
and Microsoft development tools,
it´s all about the openess,
which makes Microsoft the
glue between all of these.
