With classic Marvel IP, cool card battles, and rich storylines, this mobile game "MARVEL SNAP" has been loved by players all over the world since its launch. At the annual awards ceremony of The Game Awards 2022, it even won the best mobile game award with its outstanding performance.
Its research and development company, Second Dinner, had an ambitious vision from the very beginning: hoping to use a small team of engineers to produce an online game with millions of players around the world and low maintenance costs. They want to enable developers to get products to market quickly and free them from the heavy lifting of maintaining infrastructure.
Based on the serverless architecture of Amazon cloud technology, Second Dinner cooperated with its publisher, Nuverse, to design and apply a brand-new solution. This solution is fully managed and has the characteristics of high elasticity and scalability, which can be quickly expanded. to millions of players. The game based on this scheme became one of the most popular and well-received works in the world 4 months after its launch, and won the honor of "Mobile Game of the Year Award".
Opportunity: Use Amazon Cloud Technology Gaming Solutions to Scale Up Development Speed and Flexibility
The card game "Hearthstone" gained more than 10 million users within one month of its release, and the founder of Second Dinner is the mastermind behind "Hearthstone". As a newly established independent game studio in 2019, after being authorized by Marvel Entertainment, Second Dinner began to develop a game based on Marvel IP. At an industry event, the team came across representatives from Chao Xi Guang Nian, who wanted to work with a studio with a global perspective and experience.
Second Dinner engineers showed the team at Dawn and Night a prototype of MARVEL SNAP, where players compete against digital cards containing special abilities in the online Marvel Universe. Players fight against other players by using Marvel universe character cards that contain various special abilities. The game style is very different from "Hearthstone", but the operation and maintenance characteristics are similar.
"Nuverse can provide developers with the advantage of scale, providing independent studios with key resources that smaller businesses lack, including marketing resources and investment." Tom van Dam, head of the global business development team at Chaoxi Guangnian, said, "We also take care of the back end. infrastructure, giving developers full autonomy and creative freedom."
In the traditional model, similar games are run on a single server in the data center or cloud, but Second Dinner is committed to using the Serverless architecture provided by Amazon Cloud Technology Game Solutions to help users build, run and develop their game clouds services and solutions. Aaron Brunstetter, Vice President of Engineering at Second Dinner, said, "We realized very early that using Amazon cloud technology services would allow us to better focus on game creativity and development of these unique tasks. To this end, we Using a series of services and solutions that can help us achieve our goals." Second Dinner developed games under its own Amazon cloud technology account, and then migrated the architecture to the fast-growing Amazon cloud technology account for stress testing and deployment.
The teams of Second Dinner and Chaoxi Guangnian worked with the technical account manager of Amazon Cloud Technology to complete the migration of the deployment within 3 weeks. "If we were on our own, this would have taken us about six months," says Brunstetter. "Near-instant transfer deployment is critical to the success of our product launch." The fully managed serverless architecture means engineers can focus on Focus on game functions, not infrastructure operation and maintenance. "Amazon's cloud technology support helps us learn quickly," van Dam said. "The fact that MARVEL SNAP launched with very few issues is further proof of that."
Solution: fully managed serverless architecture to fully meet development needs
After the Second Dinner game called "MARVEL SNAP" was launched in October 2022, it had millions of players around the world in just a few months. Early stress tests have pushed concurrency levels to 140,000 games per minute without interruption, giving the team more confidence to handle requests from large numbers of users.
One of the key features of MARVEL SNAP is matchmaking: evaluating and selecting the right players for card battles in seconds. As its internal matchmaking solution hit scalability limits, Second Dinner turned to a feature in Amazon GameLift that provides dedicated server management for session-based multiplayer games. They used the Amazon GameLift FlexMatch feature as a stand-alone matchmaking service, customized to the needs of MARVEL SNAP. Second Dinner used Amazon GameLift FlexMatch to generate the highest game match volume ever using the service. "The standalone Amazon GameLift FlexMatch feature fits our needs perfectly and fits right into the Event-Driven Architecture we've adopted," said Brenna Moore, Senior Software Engineer at Second Dinner. "It provides configurable The rule set allows us to do high-quality matching according to our needs."
In order to better serve millions of players in six regions around the world, the client of "MARVEL SNAP" uses Amazon API Gateway to connect with players' mobile terminal devices. The fully managed features of Amazon API Gateway make it easier to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and protect API interfaces, and the Serverless, event-driven Amazon Lambda computing service it is connected to can run almost any type of application or backend side-served code without provisioning or managing servers. Second Dinner's serverless architecture based on Amazon Lambda can be well integrated with other Amazon cloud technology services in the Chaoxi Guangnian account to jointly provide a stable online user experience.
To further improve the resiliency of the architecture, Second Dinner uses Amazon EventBridge, a serverless event bus that helps ingest, filter, transform, route, and deliver events. For example, Amazon EventBridge can locate player data stored in Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed serverless key-value NoSQL database. "We didn't want to build the backend for the game," Moore said, "We wanted our energy to be spent building the actual game." In fact, Second Dinner saved engineers as much as 20 additional manpower costs that they would otherwise have spent These positions have to be recruited to manage the operation and maintenance management of infrastructure such as servers and backends.
Not only that, but Second Dinner and Chaoxi Guangnian also gained a better understanding of infrastructure costs and ran their business without needing to build their own hardware and bear the financial burden of software. “Cost was a big factor for us from the start,” says van Dam. “We were also able to overcome time zone and language barriers, and while we were working with the Amazon cloud technology team in multiple locations, it didn’t take a lot of time. To support the infrastructure, just focus on the development of core functions.” The architecture’s support for cross-regional games helps to realize new functions. For example, Battle Mode gives players the option to compete against friends or anonymous players on the Internet.
Achievements: Migrated full-stack serverless data analysis, achieving 30% cost reduction
In 2022, "MARVEL SNAP" won the Best Mobile Game of the Year award at The Game Awards. As the game's popularity continues to rise, Second Dinner will continue to introduce new features in the game, aiming to meet the service needs of millions of players around the world playing online at the same time. Tom van Dam, head of the global BD team of Zhaoxi Guangnian, believes, "MARVEL SNAP is a flagship product. While we are committed to serving more players around the world, we also hope to use "MARVEL SNAP" as a model Building such a great game at scale allows the success to be replicated."