The Studio

Highwire Games is a small team of veteran game developers tasked with developing Six Days in Fallujah, a a first-person tactical shooter that drops you into real-world urban combat that requires real-life tactics to overcome.

 Crafted with help from dozens of Marines and Soldiers who fought in one of the world’s most harrowing modern battles, this is urban combat as it’s really fought.

 As part of it’s Early Access, it deployed cooperative missions that can be played by 1-4 human players against sophisticated AI. Teamwork is essential because these AI enemies will stalk, flank, ambush, sneak through tunnels, and lure you into traps. They use the same tactics against you that made the Second Battle of Fallujah among the bloodiest in half a century.

The Challenge

Having initially delivered on seven maps and scenarios, the next milestone was to add seamless multiplayer to deliver on the game’s  ambition with a live player base. To ensure the performance required by its authentic gameplay, the options of peer-to-peer was discarded – the game required authoritative servers.

A unique challenge of procedurally generated maps was they needed to generate these maps quickly based on in-game assets ahead of accepting players on their game server. In addition, it needed to ship these alongside a host of additional features like bots.

In other words, no small feat that limited resources available to integrate multiplayer game server hosting.

Highwire dutifully investigated all service providers, and chose Edgegap.

The Solution

Edgegap’s robust yet simple to integrate solution was critical for Highwire’s primary challenge of high-performance game server. This enabled Highwire to have their backend run in minutes rather than months of tedious work, enabling them to funnel valuable development resources on game dev.

The distributed cloud hosting solution Edgegap’s platform offers was a perfect fit: already compatible with Highwire’s Epic Online Services game services, it allowed the Six Days in Fallujah developers to deploy game servers across multiple providers worldwide on the world’s largest edge network – enabling Edgegap’s orchestrator to deploy game servers nearest users, which reduced latency and increased fairness, the sole provider able to deliver this level of performance.

• Performance: Latency is the number one reason for player to churn out of multiplayer – even more so when authenticity is the core of the play experience. Automated game server orchestration tapping into 615+ locations ensure optimal latency for players worldwide regardless of their locality through proximity hosting of persistent game server instances.

• Region-less hosting: Like latency, being able to tap into all of Edgegap’s 615+ locations on-demand ensured Highwire’s global player base would have the ideal game server hosting, without comprising by limiting the game to just a few regions.

• Support: Given Highwire’s unique challenges, Edgegap’s development team was an ever-present resource during the integration process, helping guide Highwire’s team, and helping optimize their game server performance itself to minimize bandwidth and egress usage. This collaboration continues, providing insights and fixes to support Highwire well past after integration as Highwire continues to develop the game; including crash report tools and the ability to create a player proxy to securely send API requests.

• Resiliency: While some errors are likely, Six Days in Fallujah players have enjoyed a stable experience free of server outages thanks to Edgegap’s automated multi-cloud management.

• Simplicity: With a very small team, Highwire’s backend developers were able to integrate Edgegap in days, and likely save hundreds of days of labour from traditional hosting services.

• Pricing: Edgegap no commitment hosting helped Highwire use its resources, and cashflow, to align with the game’s growing popularity without overspending thanks to the platform’s pay-per-use hosting model that is entirely in-sync with player demand.

Conclusion

The team, with an ongoing impressive player count, added authoritative game servers and orchestration easily in days, thanks to Edgegap’s simple integration and access to its developers who provided support at every turn, as to deliver on their ambitious content roadmap.