Harmony Games Deploys a Fully Custom Game Backend Utilizing AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)

Introduction: The importance of selecting a proper game backend

Selecting a game backend solution is one of the most significant decisions that game studios face during development. The decision criteria varies depending on the type of game being released, the game launch timeline, the available engineering resources, and studio budgets.

Harmony Games, a mobile game studio founded in 2023, considered two possible paths for solving the backend problem. The first was building its backend from scratch, which the studio quickly determined would take too long. The second was partnering with a third-party Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform (a common choice for startup game studios), but Harmony found the solutions difficult to customize for their game.

“We needed server infrastructure to create player accounts and store their data, such as auto generated ID, device type, OS information, items in the game, and progress in the game,” says Norman Argueta, Lead Backend Engineer at Harmony Games. With a beta launch of its first game “Domino Adventures” (a casual mobile game in the connect tiles space, with an RPG twist) just months away, Harmony also needed a solution that could be implemented quickly.

Introducing the AWS Game Backend Framework

AWS introduced the AWS Game Backend Framework in order to simplify the often painstaking process of cross-platform game backend development, and provide a unified way of developing scalable backend features on AWS. It supports multiple game engines out of the box, such as Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), Unity and Godot, while providing options for integrations with custom engines through REST APIs. The framework comes with a scalable identity component that supports a number of key OpenID Connect (OIDC) options such as Facebook, Google Play, Sign in with Apple, and Steam. The identity component also supports anonymous guest users for getting started quickly, and allows extending to other platforms, such as consoles, by using the existing integrations as a starting point. The framework provides templates for getting started with serverless and container-based backend feature development, and includes an end-to-end Amazon GameLift Integration for building multiplayer games. All of the components come with observability built in, using AWS X-Ray and Amazon CloudWatch to provide visibility into game backend performance. The components are automatically deployed with AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), which simplifies deployments while keeping them consistent across environments.

Conclusion: How Harmony Games utilized the framework

The team at Harmony found the Guidance for Custom Game Backend Hosting compelling due to its open-source nature, built-in security, and simplified deployment. “It’s an open source solution which we can customize depending on our needs. Even better that it’s built with the two most popular programming languages, Python and JavaScript. The framework has security implemented out of the box, which came as an added benefit. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) was one of our main priorities for replicating environments and scaling, and the framework is using AWS CDK,” explains Norman.

In less than an hour, Harmony Games had a scalable, serverless backend to support their game including authentication, game state, and player state storage. Furthermore, Harmony was able to extend the solution to include additional player metrics such as device information (for example, login and logout times, device information, country of origin), allowing the studio to better support its players in the future. The changes and configurations were codified in the AWS CDK template, allowing Harmony to replicate their environment for further testing.

About Harmony Games

Harmony Games was founded by AAA industry veterans Volkan Ediz, James Koh, and Joseph Kubiak. Their first game, Domino Adventures, is set for global release in 2025, with a beta launch targeted for Q3 2024. The RPG twist on their casual connect tiles game includes shared characters and narratives across multiple mini-games, which the studio has named “The World of Tiles.” Its $3M investment round was led by Griffin Gaming Partners. Learn more about Harmony Games and Domino Adventures by visiting their website at www.harmonygames.co