CryoFall Dev.Blog #30 - Pre-launch preparations

Greetings!

CryoFall open alpha is approaching and we're making final preparations! We've decided to make the game completely free during the initial soft-launch period to gather player's feedback and continue improving the game before the release!

So, today we'd like to talk about some very interesting technical solutions that we've just finished implementing for the game backend and specifically - cloud game servers.

As you probably know, many online and multiplayer games quite often experience various issues on launch such as not being able to secure enough server resources (should there be too many players), latency bottlenecks, long waiting lists, etc. This mostly stems from the lack of ability to scale server infrastructure quickly to meet demand and management difficulties.

Naturally, we are a much smaller team and it is unlikely that we will see ten million players on launch, still, being a multiplayer game it is very important for us to be able to scale our servers easily. Consequently, doing it manually is simply out of the question.

Our approach for dealing with this problem is to use Docker containers and .NET Core running on cloud servers provided by Vultr!

How does it work? First and most important point is that we created a completely automated management solution that allows us to quickly deploy and manage any number of cloud server instances. Secondly, this will allow us to avoid any latency-related issues as well, as we can use cloud servers specifically from the regions where our players are actually located to provide the best connection speed and quality.

Here's the result of our first test deployment of cloud infrastructure:

And it took just a few minutes to deploy!

What's more, in the future this system will allow us to add player-owned servers for a very reasonable price - for those of you who might be interested to run your own world. We will manage the servers for you and provide technical support - including automatic updates and scheduled maintenance and backups to ensure the best experience. Naturally, you will be able to host any servers yourself too, even on your home computer.

For the soft-launch we will run only a couple of servers, most likely in North America. But from there we will be gradually increasing their number with the growth of the community as needed.

We were hoping to soft-launch CryoFall in January, but it looks like we will have to push it to February. There's still a lot of things to prepare for launch.

Anyway, stay tuned for more news and don't forget to join our forums and follow us on the usual social media: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit for all the important updates regarding launch!