Key Highlights

• A team of 10 developers successfully shipped their first playable of Aeon Wars: Maschinen Crisis, namely the core loop through their multiplayer experience, played by hundreds during Steam’s Games from Quebec Sale Event. 

• Allowing them to prioritize their core game development and ship faster, Soliton Interactive embraced external tools, services, and platforms to skip the development of crucial backend components.

• Edgegap supported Soliton Interactive’s server orchestration through its robust and automated platform, ensuring the studio was ready for any scale of players, with the lowest latency possible for players worldwide and completely removing the work of planning and provisioning. 

• No upfront fees and flat rates ensured easy estimates of costs. 

The Studio

Liko-Paul Pinsonnault founded its indie studio, Soliton Interactive, with friends Alexandre Ouimet and Catherine Messier with one big dream. To bring the incredible and detailed world of collectible miniature tabletop games to video games.

The team had experience building and managing Online and Network teams for multiplayer experiences of massive franchises such as Rainbow Six: Siege and World of Tanks, and at studios such as Ubisoft and Wargaming. Yet, the task remained daunting for an indie studio.

The Challenge

With a small team of 10 developers with big ambitions, the team wanted its first playable of Aeon Wars: Maschinen Crisis to be its multiplayer experience.

Tabletop collectibles miniature is all about the social and competitive experience of direct combat with friends and new foes alike. To secure this proof of concept, the team at Soliton Interactive needed to tackle its core loop through multiplayer first.

Resources come at a premium for small teams, and crucial decisions must be made as a new studio with literally everything to build. As such, Soliton decided to carefully pick the tools, services and partners it wanted to craft its game and stay on time and budget. 

The Solution

As part of their solution suite, Edgegap came to the forefront for Aeon Wars’ server orchestration. Compatible with its other tools, the automated and distributed cloud network solution Edgegap’s platform offers was a perfect fit for the ambition and needs of Soliton Interactive. 

In short:

• Performance: Aeon Wars would have the best latency possible for all its players regardless of conditions such as fluctuating player count across regions. Ensuring everyone in the community would get the optimal experience, helping Soliton grow its fan base and keep it positive.

• Resilience: With a short window for its pre-Alpha test, any outages would impact Soliton Interactive heavily. Edgegap’s 450 locations across 16 provide ensured its multiplayer would always be accessible during the playtest event.

• Easiness: Edgegap’s best-in-class tools allowed the team to easily automate and manage their multiplayer game hosting operations and deploy them worldwide instantly. It was also compatible with Unreal 5, and game tools ensured a smooth integration.

• Efficiency: Access to a platform ready for production allowed the studio to prioritize its development workload and access market-leading solutions without costly investments or finding (scarce) experts to hire. Making their studio a more fun place to work, too – having devs work on the game itself instead of everything around it.

• Flexibility: The team at Edgegap was always available and provided input and solutions to support Soliton Interactive on Discord and over voice or video calls.

• Pricing: No upfront fees and flat, “pay per minutes” rates helped Soliton Interactive estimate and manage costs.

Conclusion

With its pre-Alpha playtest completed, Soliton Interactive has the foundation for its game and knowledge it can ship its title in the future.

Edgegap is proud of its collaboration with Soliton Interactive. Both are Canadian-based developers who share a love of video games. For Edgegap to help a newcomer to introduce the first playable of its ambitious game – to the entire world – through multiplayer was an inspiring and fun experience with a great partner.