How Noodlecake Delivers Multiplayer and Forgets the Servers Exist
Written in collaboration with
Noodlecake Studios
Key Highlights
Noodlecake got Super Flappy Golf's multiplayer live, and Edgegap's automated deployment handled the rest. No idle servers to monitor and no constant tuning, so the team could spend its time on the game rather than the backend. As Head of Technology Ben Schmidt put it, once things were migrated he could "sit back and let it do its thing."
Super Flappy Golf is a fast, precision-timing race to the golf cup that ends the round, with up to eight players. Edgegap deploys each match at the ideal spot for the players grouped ahead of it, balancing low latency with a level playing field so no one is put at a disadvantage by where they connect from. The result, in Ben's words, was multiplayer that has "been more robust than ever."
Edgegap's just-in-time, on-demand Edge Cloud hosting spins a server up per match and down when it's done. That avoids the traditional fleet model, where capacity sits idle between matches and still gets billed. For a free-to-play mobile title where cost per user shapes profitability, Ben found the pricing "has been more than fair."
The Studio
Noodlecake has been making games in Saskatoon, Canada since 2011. What began as a small group of friends building something fun on the early App Store grew into an award-winning studio and publisher, known to millions through its Stickman Golf and Super Stickman Golf titles.
Super Flappy Golf is the studio's follow-up to its viral Flappy Golf series. Players flap a birdie to the hole in as few flaps as possible across 30 launch courses, now with new glide and dive mechanics, a Lowest Flaps mode, and hundreds of collectible birdie traits that hatch into millions of possible combinations. The multiplayer hook is a frantic race to the cup with up to eight friends. Players have responded, giving the game a 4.6-star rating on Google Play, with one review calling it "the best flappy golf game yet."
The Challenge
Super Flappy Golf lives or dies on responsiveness. It is a latency-sensitive game, and a race to the cup only feels fair when a server sits at the ideal location between the players in a match, so everyone gets low latency and no one is disadvantaged by distance. That was the first requirement, and it set the bar.
"We have a very latency-sensitive game, so we wanted to keep latency to a minimum."
The second was efficiency. Noodlecake's previous solution could scale up and down, but not fast enough, which meant keeping a server or two running at all times even when nobody was playing. Paying for standby capacity is exactly the kind of waste a free-to-play title cannot carry.
"We wanted a system that would ideally not have unallocated servers running all the time."
The third was time. Noodlecake wanted infrastructure that stayed out of the way: reliable, low-maintenance, and only worth a second thought when shipping new features.
"We wanted a system that would be reliable and not require much regular thought or maintenance from us unless we were deploying new features."
— Ben Schmidt, Head of Technology, Noodlecake Studios
The Solution
Noodlecake chose Edgegap, and the entire migration was handled by a single developer. For a switch of core multiplayer infrastructure, that is about as low-friction as it gets.
Edgegap deploys game servers on-demand across its Edge Cloud network, a regionless infrastructure of 615+ locations worldwide. Rather than picking a fixed region, its decision-making system weighs the connections of every player grouped into a match and deploys the server where it delivers the best balance of low latency and fairness for all of them. Three things mattered most for Noodlecake.
Automated orchestration replaced the DevOps workload. The tasks the old setup demanded, manually balancing capacity, choosing regions, and keeping servers warm, are handled by the platform. Once the game was migrated, it ran on its own, and Noodlecake reported no influx of player complaints about matchmaking or servers after the switch.
Ben Schmidt, Head of Technology at Noodlecake Studios, summed up what that bought the team:
"We were able to get things up and focus on other, more pressing issues, which is exactly what we wanted."
Optimal deployment kept the game fair and responsive. By deploying each match where it best serves the whole group of players, Edgegap took both the latency and the fairness requirement off Noodlecake's plate. The team did not need to run its own analysis to feel the difference in the game.
"Edgegap seems to have delivered on all fronts. After the switch we didn't get any influx in user complaints regarding matchmaking or servers, and once our dev got things migrated I have mostly been able to sit back and let it do its thing. Anecdotally, multiplayer has been more robust than ever."
Just-in-time deployment aligned cost with play. Because servers exist only while a match needs them, Noodlecake pays for real usage instead of reserved capacity. It is the cost model a free-to-play game needs, and in practice it held up.
"Pricing has been more than fair. If anything I'm hoping our marketing plans in the next few months help drive up the numbers so we're paying you a bit more."
Conclusion
The best infrastructure is the kind you stop thinking about. Noodlecake got Super Flappy Golf's multiplayer running on Edgegap, kept it responsive and fair for eight-player races worldwide, and went back to doing what Noodlecake has done since 2011: making fun games.
