Get your Game on with AWS’s Top Notch Game Development Services

Overview

Simplified user experience is one of the most important aspects to consider while developing gaming applications. Fewer clicks to download and install are considered a priority for improving the user experience for gamers.

In this blog, we are going to look at top-notch gaming services launched by Amazon for gamers to play games remotely in the cloud.

Cloud refers to a network of data centers that are filled with servers that deliver content to whoever is trying to access it. Cloud gaming offers a similar thing. When we sign up for a service, we buy access to a remote server configured with hardware suitable for running games. Once we launch a game, a video stream of the Game is sent to our machine.

Game Developers like to focus on building fun, innovative games that delight players rather than spending time and effort on building infrastructure. Developers need servers that can scale when the number of players increases globally at the lowest cost.

Developers need purpose-built services and solutions to navigate cloud migration workloads from on-premises and onboard talent quickly and efficiently from anywhere in the world, leveraging the trend for remote and distributed game development to get to market faster.

Top Game developing companies like Sony Interactive Entertainment, Epic Games, Gearbox Software, Riot Games, Behaviour Interactive, Warner Bros. Games, Ubisoft, The Pokémon Company International, SundayToz, Redhill Games, Gameloft, and Kixeye are constantly getting support from AWS.

It accelerates deployment across solution areas by becoming a medium between developers and industry-leading AWS Partners such as AMD, AppsFlyer, Beamable, Databricks, Epic Games, Incredibuild, NVIDIA, Parsec, Perforce, Slalom, Snowflake, and Teradici.

Services provided by AWS for Game Development:

1. Cloud Game Development
2. Game Servers
3. Live Operations
4. Game Analytics
5. Game AI and ML
6. Game Security

Cloud Game Development

We often spend large amounts of time setting up flexible, secure, low-latency infrastructure to support our remote and distributed development teams. Cloud Game Development provides solutions to developers that can create flexible, remote studios and deploy GPU-powered workstations allowing the artists and designers to work on multiple large files in the cloud.

It also enables studios to build distributed game development pipelines, reducing the security risk across remote employee environments while using Amazon EC2 instances to build and test games.

1. Studio: Amazon Nimble Studio helps us make game production a collaborative process by allowing us to use multiple workstations from different locations. With AWS Cloud Development Kit, game developers are equipped to create assets using popular software applications, use popular version control tools, and run incredibly to create a build farm that leverages Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, reducing build times and lowering costs.
2. Workstations: Parsec, Teradici, Tehama, Revolgy, and Epic Games allow their teams to set up workstations suitable for various development tools and workflows required to develop games while providing low latency and security for content producers.
3. Build pipelines
4. Version Control
5. 3D World Building: It helps developers to build graphically rich, online virtual worlds where players interact, play games, and socialize with shared experiences. Open 3D Engine (O3DE) can be customized with AWS features and extended to meet specific world-building requirements.
6. Consulting Support: Slalom, Globant, Six Nines, TEKsystems, Revolgy, and EPAM are partners who provide implementation support regardless of the geography or size of the project.

Game Server

The game operations team is responsible for designing, deploying, and operating dedicated server solutions to support session-based games’ highly variable global gaming traffic. Game servers allow teams to run games in a large cloud with secure and adaptable computing power while leveraging the global AWS network to provide the slightest uninterrupted gamer experience worldwide. We can provide it at a cost. Whether we use a managed service like AmazonGameLift with AmazonGameLiftFlexMatch or choose between Windows, Linux, and Arm-based computing options, sessions provide gamers with globally distributed capacity and a reliable, reliable, low-latency experience. We can deploy a base gaming infrastructure. It scales to the player’s traffic while maintaining elasticity.

1. Game Infrastructure for Session-based games: GameLift, GameLift FlexMatch, GameLift FleetIQ, Graviton 2, and AMD Instances.
2. Global Game Infrastructure: AWS global infrastructure includes 26 Regions, 84 Availability Zones, and 17 Local Zones. Services like AWS Global Accelerator accelerated networking and AWS Outposts help us to reach further and provide a low-latency, uninterrupted gamer experience.
3. Game Streaming: AWS offers GPU-based instances powered by AMD and NVIDIA and allows companies to deliver graphics-intensive experiences to worldwide audiences, regardless of the device they use.

Live Operations

Production teams must implement additional features in released and upcoming games to keep players engaged without incurring downtime or compromising the gameplay experience. With Live Operations solutions, teams can configure and deploy gaming service capabilities to reduce development time and scale to meet player demand while improving the experience through monetization and player acquisition/retention.

1. Amazon GameSparks: A fully managed game backend service that provides tools that can simplify backend development. Developers can add the Amazon GameSparks SDK to their game clients to create, customize, and deploy pre-built backend game features such as authentication, player messaging, and managed player data. They can also write server code for custom game features. It is available publicly in the US East (N. Virginia) region.
2. AWS GameKit: It is an open-source solution that allows game developers to add cloud-based game functionality with AWS’s Well-Architected backend solutions and retain the full ability to customize them directly from their game engine. Features of AWS GameKit are – Identity and Authentication, User Game Data, Achievements, and Saving Game State to the Cloud. It is currently available for Unreal Engine integration in 17 AWS Regions.

Game Analytics

Production teams need to collect, process, and gain insights from games that generate large amounts of data and need the expertise to build, operate, and scale analytics pipelines. Game analytics solutions enable teams to configure and deploy purpose-built analytics pipelines that leverage managed infrastructure components to reduce operational costs and complexity while scaling elastically to adapt to changes in data traffic.

Game AI and ML

Using AI and ML we can identify the toxic behavior of players playing the live Game within the gaming community. It can also be used to improve the experience of gaming.

Game Security

With more and more games being streamed, the Game is constantly being updated. Malicious activities are on the rise, which can cripple the Game and create a bad player experience. Services like AWS Shield, protection against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and Amazon GuardDuty, monitor malicious activity and anomalous behavior and ensure that users’ experience is not hampered.

1. Defend against DDoS attacks
2. Defend against data breaches: We need to monitor game health, create custom dashboards to view the health and utilization of infrastructure and monitor in-game errors and anomalies with AWS Services, including AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS WAF.

AWS Nimble Studio

Amazon Nimble Studio helps us to produce visual effects, animation, and interactive content entirely in the cloud, from storyboard sketches to deliverable finals. It quickly engages and collaborates with artists worldwide and can create content faster with access to virtual workstations, high-speed memory, and scalable rendering across a global infrastructure of AWS.

Advantages of Nimble Studio:

1. Accelerate cloud transition
2. Can scale up with demand
3. Can be accessed remotely
4. Simplified workstation pricing.
5. Seamless collaboration
6. High standard data security

Working on Nimble Studio

It is available in the following regions: N Virginia, Los Angeles, Oregon, Sydney, and Central London.

Pricing

Linux Instances

Windows Instances

We also need persistent storage, AWS Thinkbox Deadline for rendering orchestration system, IAM such as Active Directory, new VPC with the following infrastructure:

• FSx for Windows 
• AWS Managed Microsoft AD 
• AWS Thinkbox Deadline resources

Example

Conclusion

Server administration, network security, live service games, and many other in-depth development services for specialized needs are all available with AWS for Games. Amazon has also teamed with several big names in the gaming and software development industries, including Epic Games, NVIDIA, and AMD.

About CloudThat

CloudThat is the official AWS (Amazon Web Services) Advanced Consulting Partner, Microsoft Gold Partner, Google Cloud Partner, and Training Partner helping people develop knowledge of the cloud and help their businesses aim for higher goals using best-in-industry cloud computing practices and expertise. We are on a mission to build a robust cloud computing ecosystem by disseminating knowledge on technological intricacies within the cloud space. Explore our consulting here.

If you have any queries regarding AWS Game Development, Amazon Nimble Studio, or any other AWS service, drop a line below the comments section. I will get back to you at the earliest.

FAQs

Q1: How can we get our data/assets in and out of Nimble Studio?

Ans: We can use AWS services like AWS Data Sync or AWS Snowball devices to import or export data to and from S3 and access that data in Nimble Studio via FSx.

Q2: Which game engines can be used in Amazon GameLift?

Ans: Amazon GameLift supports Amazon Lumberyard, Unity, Unreal, and other customs C++ and C# game engines.

WRITTEN BY Rahul Kumar Sharma