How our expert team helped the gaming project “Awakening of Heroes” achieve the desired level of scalability, stability, and security on Google Cloud infrastructure.
“Awakening of Heroes” is a free 5-on-5 MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) game developed by the Belgrade studio COFA Games. AoH contains role-playing and battle royale elements and is created for mobile devices (Android and iOS). Since its game is simultaneously accessed by multiple players globally, the company needed a reliable and secure game hosting solution with low latency, high scalability, and high security. After analyzing the needs of the COFA Games team, our team suggested Google Cloud as the optimal solution for the project.
Awakening of Heroes is a complex project that includes numerous components and requires extensive resource allocation. To support thousands of users from around the world at any given moment, a dynamically scalable infrastructure was needed. The project required a systematic, detailed-oriented approach. Our first task was to establish communication with the team developing the game and provide answers to the following questions:
After obtaining all the necessary information, our team designed and implemented processes and work organization, offering a specific execution plan to meet all the requirements, complete all tasks, and develop tangible solutions with the potential to enhance the entire project, including cloud migration.
The Game Room is a component that virtually brings together a group of AoH players participating in a single game session. The platform chosen by our client for building this component was Google Cloud, with our task being to build servers in three different locations:
Our task was to build a dynamic server infrastructure that makes scalability possible and allows the platform to integrate new players at any moment.
Proper server monitoring was crucial for both aspects – server stability and data security – but it is also closely related to server scalability. Unlike the web hosting environment, where server monitoring is a relatively simple task, the multiplayer game environment makes the whole process more complex and requires internal monitoring within the game itself.
To achieve server stability, the AoH and Mainstream teams had to work together on the following:
Since some players are highly motivated to hack the game and bypass security measures to earn virtual money or advance in the game through cheating, it was vital to make such scenarios impossible.
As multiplayer video games are most often played by people from around the world, players must be grouped according to their location to avoid latency or the popular “lag.” With this in mind, each region needs to have a dedicated server used exclusively for local players, which is why most such games ask players for their location information. Unlike desktop video games, mobile multiplayer games are more sensitive to latency because players access the game via WiFi, 3G, or 4G internet connections.
Our task was to find the right service within Google Cloud and achieve an optimal level of scalability.
The load balancer also acts as a protective barrier against DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks. Since the load balancer is also defined as one of the cloud provider’s services, it is automatically protected from a certain amount of DDoS attacks, and its use directly affects the stability and security of the servers.
Having multiple regions where a new version of the application needs to be launched can be a challenge closely related to the application version users have on their devices. There are numerous components to consider, and the process of releasing a new version involves multiple phases that do not always occur in the same order.
The best practice, and the one we decided to follow, is to first release the new version in the region with the fewest players and perform a Git push on the master branch so that the CI/CD pipeline detects the new version and its release within the auto-scaling group can be done automatically.
This process is most often done through the “blue-green deployment” strategy, during which one server group is removed from the auto-scaling group, and new servers containing the updated application version are added.
The work process in this phase is very similar to that used when launching a new application version. The main goal is to achieve the highest possible level of availability for each application, which is achieved by using multiple servers placed behind load balancers.
The most tangible result of our work lies in aspects of financial savings and increased final project revenue. This was achieved through the establishment of an infrastructure capable of supporting the initial number of players while also expanding as the number of players and the game’s popularity grows, eliminating the need for significant upfront capital investments.
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