Red Barrels Launches The Outlast Trials with a Single Backend Engineer Using AWS

Red Barrels is a fully independent studio based in Quebec, and it is known for its successful horror franchise, Outlast. All Outlast games had offered a rich single-player experience, but the studio aimed to shake things up with multiplayer play for The Outlast Trials. Yet, if the title was to succeed, the game needed to be highly reliable, simple to maintain, and cost efficient. To meet those requirements while preserving developer time for the game itself, Red Barrels decided to build its backend infrastructure entirely on AWS. “For us, using a lot of managed services made sense,” says Sauvé. “If you use AWS services properly, you reduce the time that developers spend managing infrastructure by 10 times.”

The Canadian game studio spent 5 years building The Outlast Trials. During that time, Sauvé spent only 30 percent of his time on backend work, devoting the rest to improving the actual game play. The first year of backend work was spent laying a robust foundation that could accommodate a wide range of game features. Red Barrels selected Amazon GameLift, which deploys and manages dedicated game servers on AWS, to verify that its game scaled with fluctuating player demand. “We didn’t find anything that could solve as many challenges as Amazon GameLift,” says Sauvé. “It was one of the main reasons we went with AWS.”

Initially, Red Barrels evaluated developing solutions on its own, but it wanted to save developer time. The company opted to use Amazon DynamoDB, a fully managed key-value and document database, for most of its storage needs. To build a number of its game environments, Red Barrels implemented Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed service for running Kubernetes. “The whole stack that we use is very simple,” says Sauvé. “Every time I add something, I have to think about maintaining it in the future.”

After the foundation was in place, it was time to start adding features. The Outlast Trials builds on the story arc of the other Outlast titles, and Red Barrels wanted the narrative to be just as compelling as those of the single-player games. But because the studio switched to a new game engine, Unreal Engine 4, everything about the technical aspects of the game was made from scratch. This challenged the team to develop creative features. “It’s never fun saying no to game designers who are trying to make the game fun,” says Sauvé. “But building new features was always possible and simple to do using what AWS offered.”

After a successful beta in 2022, Red Barrels extensively used AWS Infrastructure Event Management (AWS IEM), a service offering architecture and scaling guidance, to enhance the cost efficiency and performance of its game. Equipped with best practices, Red Barrels implemented a highly effective architecture that makes use of AWS tools. When the early-access release kicked off in the spring of 2023, a member of the AWS IEM team was present onsite, and several others were available on Discord, just in case an issue came up. “It’s great to have someone to contact directly,” says Sauvé. “Using AWS IEM, you have someone you can contact anytime, even at night.”

To the studio’s credit, there were no issues during the launch. The title had already sold one million copies after 2 months, with 50,000 concurrent players during the early-access weekend. Red Barrels is also hoping to set new records for Twitch viewership. “We’ve had no negative feedback in terms of game stability,” says Sauvé. “People are really happy about performance, connectivity, and gameplay.”