The 5 backend tools every game developer needs

At the recent Game Developer Conference Europe in Cologne, I met a lot of developers with creative and innovative ideas. Some of these ideas could have a big impact on the game industry. Unfortunately, most of these developers were making easily avoidable infrastructure mistakes, like building onsite rather than in the cloud — a shortsighted decision that greatly hinders their ability to scale. Great ideas only get game developers so far; they also need the proper architecture tools.

The wide availability of payment tools combined with the popularity of free-to-play models and growing popularity of massive-multiplayer games and social gaming, independent game makers have a great opportunity to make their games a financial success. Most developers are not setup for success, however, because they have neglected infrastructure. What good is a potentially viral, sticky game that can only handle a few hundred players?

Here are five categories of infrastructure that game developers absolutely must consider if they hope for their idea to become a reality.

High-performance cloud infrastructure

Many developers we meet make the mistake of building their initial game on low-performance machines in a private data center. Although it may save costs in the beginning, the strategy fails to take into account high-performance gameplay and the unpredictable burst of user growth that inevitably occurs once a game gets ranked on a great blog or listing and starts to take off. Start with future success in mind by choosing a public cloud, like AWS, SoftLayer, Google Compute Engine or Windows Azure. The public cloud provides the freedom to easily scale up machine resources and deploy an environment in specific global data centers in order to meet variable demand that scales up or down.

NoSQL databases

Even a relatively simple mobile game demands more than one database. The good news is that we have entered a golden age of open-source NoSQL databases. Developers have great and readily available open-source technologies with robust communities behind them at their fingertips. NoSQL databases like MongoDB are more flexible in how they model data while also offering better performance than relational databases.

The open-source Redis database is growing in popularity as the social aspects of gaming become ever more of a draw. Twitch, the livestreaming video platform and community for gamers that Amazon recently bought, uses Redis for its great performance. So does the mobile-gaming network Scopely. Redis is proving able to handle heavy game performance needs, including real-time leaderboards, gameplay transactions, analytics, and player profiles for up to hundreds of thousands of players as well as job-management requests such as messaging.

Application and server monitoring

Monitoring application performance is critical to ensuring that it’s functioning correctly and also for quickly identifying problematic areas when they arise. Transaction speed, error rates, and slow load times can quickly degrade player experience and kill any chance your game has of growing. Tools like New Relic, DataDog, and AppDynamics are well suited for application and server monitoring.

Log management

Games produce tons of data, most of it unstructured and complex. You may have a few friends playing your game today, but once you hit it big, the complexity of gamer volume, gameplay transactions, and gamer lifespan, among other things, will produce enormous data. This can be a headache to manage but can also be immensely valuable to improving gameplay experience, identifying your top players and quickly bringing the game experience back to normal in the event of service disruption. Consider logging solutions like Loggly and Splunk to do the job early on.

Mobile app tracking

When developing a game for a mobile phone or tablet, few things are as facepalm worthy as creating the perfect game experience and getting a great boost in the iTunes or Google Play store ranking without having measured your progress beforehand. Map out the key performance indicators that you need for growth, like installs, new and returning player volume, active user volume and player lifetime. Without keeping track of this valuable information, game developers are missing key opportunities to improve experience and cater to their audiences. Tools like Flurry, HasOffers, and Distimo offer tremendous value in tracking your mobile game’s performance over time and providing the right insights to improve the experience for your players.

It’s a great time to be a game developer. One good idea can massively impact the gaming landscape, but game developers must consider infrastructure. The tools are readily out there. Don’t fall victim to taking infrastructure for granted.

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Top 10 Companies A Game Developers Want To Work

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) published the results of a developer satisfaction surveyon Tuesday (via GameSpot's Eddie Makuch) that reveals where more than 2,200 developers would like to work.

According to the survey, the majority of game developers want to work for Valve, the developer behind the "Half-Life" series and the Steam game distribution platform.

More respondents said they would rather work for Valve than for themselves.

Check out the full list below.

1. Valve ("Half-Life," Steam, "Portal")
2. My own company
3. Activision-Blizzard ("Call of Duty," "World of Warcraft," "Skylanders")
4. BioWare ("Mass Effect," "Dragon Age," "Star Wars: The Old Republic")
5. Ubisoft ("Assassin's Creed," "Far Cry," "Just Dance")
6. Current employer
7. Nintendo ("Mario," "The Legend of Zelda," "Donkey Kong")
8. Naughty Dog ("The Last of Us," "Jak & Daxter," "Uncharted")
9. Double Fine ("Brutal Legend," "Psychonauts," "Broken Age")
10. Bethesda Game Studios ("Fallout," "The Elder Scrolls")

Valve, which is a privately owned company based in Bellevue, Washington, has created some of the most beloved titles in the last generation of consoles, including "Portal," "Left 4 Dead" and "Half-Life 2." The company has earned a 4.6 average rating on Glassdoor.com, with one reviewer calling it "the best company to work for in the tech industry," adding how Valve is "amazingly empowering" and "salaries are above top of the industry."

One unique aspect of Valve's corporate culture, as the company's employee handbook points out, is that "nobody reports to anybody else. We have a founder/president, but even he isn't your manager." (In case you're interested, the full handbook is a fun read.)

"This company is yours to steer - towards opportunities and away from risks. You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products... There's no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them," Valve's handbook reads.

After Valve and "my own company," survey respondents said Activision-Blizzard, the developers behind the popular "World of Warcraft" and "Call of Duty" franchises, was the next-most desired place to work. Here's one interesting wrinkle: Respondents said they'd rather stick with their "current employer" than work for Nintendo.

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Amkette to Launch a Gaming Device in India Priced Under INR 10,000

To tap into the expanding gaming industry in the country, Amkette is planning to launch a gaming product in Indian market before the year end, priced below INR 10,000, reportsIBNLive. The company expects to sell over 20,000 Android-based devices in this financial year alone, to compete Microsoft’s XBox and Sony Playstation.

At present, the company focuses on entertainment and audio products for mobile phone, televisions and computers as well as youth and young professionals.

“We are exploring newer variations (to Evo TV), particularly in the gaming segment. The new product will be employing high-end processors with 3D graphics capability to provide a powerful gaming platform on TV,” Amkette Director Rajiv K Bapna told PTI.

“We are also aiming for both male and female gaming enthusiasts. More and more games are getting added which appeal to the female audience as well,” he said.

The company is known for its flagship product ’Evo TV’ available in four products in the range Between INR 5,500 to INR 12,500 and allows users to surf Internet on their television sets.

According to a KPMG-FICCI study, the gaming industry in India was estimated at about INR 1,920 crore in 2013 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 16 per cent to reach INR 4,060 crore by the end of 2018.

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Will 60fps YouTube videos force game developers to prioritize frame rate?

This week, Google announced that 48fps and 60fps video playback will be available on YouTube sometime in the next few months. Most video is still shot at 24 or 30 frames per second, but there is a growing demand for high frame rate videos — specifically for video game footage. The transition to higher frame rates has been painfully slow across the board, but this move from the YouTube team could force game devs and Hollywood to focus on pumping out more frames per second. Once you’ve experienced silky-smooth 60fps video, it’s hard to go back to the blurry mess found at lower frame rates.
On its Creators Blog, Google unveiled a number of upcoming improvements for YouTube. Features like fan funding and crowdsourced subtitles are headed to the world’s most popular video distribution service, but the announcement of 48fps and 60fps video blows everything else out of the water. Users are still months away from being able to take advantage of higher frame rates for their own videos, but we did get a sneak preview of three HFR videos: a three minute clip of 60fps Titanfall gameplay, a 48fps trailer for season two of Video Game High School, and the 60fps Battlefield Hardline trailer embedded below (60fps playback is only available at 720p and 1080p).
Infamously, The Hobbit movies were shot at 48fps — twice the frame rate of most movies. While some people bemoaned the lack of a “cinematic” aesthetic, the faster frame rate allows for more fluid movement, and results in crisp footage that more closely resembles reality. High frame rate movies haven’t taken off quite yet, but James Cameron wants to film the Avatar sequels at either 48fps or 60fps. Now, innovators like Jackson and Cameron can use YouTube to spread the good word about high frame rate movies. After all, seeing is believing.
Of course, video games benefit from faster frame rates as well, but it’s traditionally been considered a hard sell to consumers. A fighting game or first-person shooter will play better at 60fps, but how do you effectively communicate that? Until recently, all consumers had to go by was screenshots and 30fps trailers. Under those constraints, many developers chose to sacrifice frame rate to beef up the visual effects on screen.
Now, sites like IGN are starting to run more 60fps videos, and the support from YouTube will take that to a whole new level of visability. Average consumers can finally see 60fps in action, so let’s hope that higher frame rates can become a selling point outside of the sphere of core gamers. When normal people can see 60fps and 30fps videos side-by-side, devs won’t be able to hide behind the traditional wisdom that prioritizes visual effects over frame rate.

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Google Play security flaw discovered by researchers

WASHINGTON: Researchers have discovered a crucial security problem in Google Play, the marketplace where millions of Android users get their apps.

Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, said Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into Google Play anyone can get a $25 account and upload whatever they want. Very little is known about what's there at an aggregate level.

He said given the huge popularity of Google Play and the potential risks to millions of users, it was important to take a close look at Google Play content.

Nieh and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot's paper is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge Google Play marketplace. To do this, they developed PlayDrone, a tool that uses various hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources.

They discovered all kinds of new information about the content in Google Play, including a critical security problem: developers often store their secret keys in their apps software, similar to usernames/passwords info, and these can be then used by anyone to maliciously steal user data or resources from service providers such as Amazon and Facebook.

These vulnerabilities can affect users even if they are not actively running the Android apps. Nieh notes that even 'top developers', designated by the Google Play team as the best developers on marketplace, included these vulnerabilities in their apps.

In fact, Nieh adds, developers are already receiving notifications from Google to fix their apps and remove the secret keys.

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