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The Digital Download

Join us for The Digital Download online event to learn the latest in game development from AWS customers and experts.

Activities

Join developer talks with live Q&A

Watch 11 developer sessions

View details 
Learn at 15+ demos

Learn at 17 demos

View demo details 
Connect with experts and the community

Learn from other game studios

Don't reinvent the wheel 

Join the conversation with AWS Game Tech experts and game developers from studios such as Gearbox, Ubisoft, and Behaviour Interactive.

Tune-in as AWS Game Tech experts cover a broad range of topics providing technical depth on architecture and code across core themes in game development.

Talk with members of the game development community as they share demos of their games and discuss challenges, milestones, and successes.

Hear from other game developers

Presentations and Q&A with AWS Game Tech customers

Join customer-led sessions to hear how developers at Behaviour Interactive, Clean Cuts Interactive, Gearbox Software, Oasis Tech, and Ubisoft use the cloud to build games that their players love.

Under-the-hood of fan-favorite games

Dive into the architecture behind games from over 15 studios including CAPCOM, Epic Games, Panzerdog, and Warner Bros. Games.

 

Behaviour Interactive
Bethesda
CAPCOM
Epic Games
Gearbox Software
nWay
Rovio
Supercell
The Pokémon Company International
Ubisoft
Voodoo
Warner Bros. Games

Session details

Click here for downloadable agenda at a glance

Agenda-at-a-glance
Opening Session
Presenter: Tabitha Graves, AWS Game Tech, Community Enablement Manager

In the opening session, Tabitha Graves provides an overview of AWS Game Tech, AWS services, and what to expect from the The Digital Download sessions and content to explore.

Session Catalog
Mix and match from 11 60-minute sessions, ranging from customer talks to game infrastructure solution deep dives.
  • Fundamentals
  • Technical Inspiration
  • How it's Built
  • Fundamentals
    • Introduction to AWS for game development

      Wondering how to get started with AWS? This session will cover how studios of all sizes and levels of cloud expertise can build faster and smarter with the AWS cloud. We'll cover compute services, purpose-built databases, analytics pipelines, and more. We’ll fire up the AWS console and get hands-on with some of the most common workloads, including login, player data storage, game server hosting, matchmaking, and more. This is a must-see for anyone new to AWS or seasoned pros looking for a refresher.

      Speakers: Daniel Whitehead, Solutions Architect, AWS Game Tech

      Peter Chapman, Games Solutions Architect, Amazon

    • Engage, retain, and delight players with LiveOps on AWS

      LiveOps is a critical component to the long-term commercial success of your game, but it’s also a difficult beast to try to tame. In this session, learn how to easily manage your players’ lifecycles and keep them engaged. Developers will learn all the tricks of the trade using AWS technologies across multiple channels to speed release cycles, coordinate simultaneous events, measure player engagement and sentiment, and detect and incent at-risk players. Integrating these technologies early into a game’s design strategy means not needing to retrofit your design later down the road.

      Speakers: Tabitha Graves, Community Enablement Manager, AWS Game Tech

      Chris Finch, Sr Technical Evangelist, AWS Game Tech

    • Drive community engagement on Twitch

      Twitch empowers developers to drive community engagement at every stage of a game’s lifecycle across all genres of games. In this session, winning plays from Borderlands 3, League of Legends, Fortnite and more will be spotlighted to show how Twitch programs (e.g. Rivals) and products (e.g. Extensions) created epic moments for their games’ communities. Developers will get a deep dive into how they can do the same and also get a chance to see what’s new in 2020 to give their games a chance to shine. It’s all part of connecting game developers to communities that love their games.

      Speakers: Tarun Gangwani, Head of Product, Development Lifecycle, Twitch

      Robbie Lim, Director of Business Development, Interactive Studio, Twitch

    • Faster, smarter decisions with AWS serverless data analytics

      Learn how to build a serverless data analytics pipeline using AWS and gain valuable insights for your game. In this session, developers discover how to use data at scale to make actionable decisions in near real-time. See examples from studios like Supercell that use analytics and how they apply machine learning to enhance player experiences. Plus, watch an integration into a Unity game built using the AWS SDK and see results in near real-time with the data you need at your fingertips.

      Speakers: Gena Gizzi, Solutions Architect, AWS

      Dominic Mills, Solutions Architect, AWS

  • Technical Inspiration
    • Deliver ultra-low latency cloud game streaming over 5G networks

      This session introduces AWS Wavelength, a new technology that brings compute services such as Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) to the edge of 5G mobile networks. This enables developers to build applications and AWS architectures that can reach 5G connected devices with single-digit millisecond latencies using familiar AWS APIs and development processes. Attendees will learn how Wavelength enables developers to deliver an ultra-low latency game streaming experience for their customers while providing a consistent AWS developer experience to deploy their games to 5G networks around the world.

      Speakers: Matt Lehwess, Principal Developer Advocate, EC2

      Nicolas Walsh, Developer Advocate, AWS Game Tech

    • Identifying suspicious activity with machine learning powered abuse detection pipelines

      Learn how to leverage AWS machine learning and artificial intelligence to build a dynamic and performant end-to-end abuse detection pipeline. In this session, developers will learn how to extract value from historical player telemetry data, train machine learning models, and deploy powerful features to automate the identification and removal of antagonistic players. Without any extensive knowledge or experience in the space needed, developers will discover how easy it is to perform these real-time predictions for flagging suspicious users with Amazon SageMaker and example architectures built on AWS.

      Speakers: Nicolas Walsh, Developer Advocate, AWS Game Tech

    • Build and deploy games faster with CI/CD pipelines

      Learn how to quickly deliver new player features at scale in a reliable, secure, and cost effective way. In this session, discover how Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, when combined with source control best practices, improve games throughout the development lifecycle. Attendees will understand how to automate the distribution of game binaries and their assets to an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) cluster.

      Speakers: Yahav Biran, Solutions Architect, AWS Game Tech

      Neelam Koshiya, Solutions Architect, AWS Game Tech

    • Introduction to AWS for game development (rebroadcast)

      Wondering how to get started with AWS? This session will cover how studios of all sizes and levels of cloud expertise can build faster and smarter with the AWS cloud. We'll cover compute services, purpose-built databases, analytics pipelines, and more. We’ll fire up the AWS console and get hands-on with some of the most common workloads, including login, player data storage, game server hosting, matchmaking, and more. This is a must-see for anyone new to AWS or seasoned pros looking for a refresher.

      Speakers: Daniel Whitehead, Solutions Architect, AWS Game Tech

      Peter Chapman, Games Solutions Architect, Amazon

  • How it's Built
    • How Ubisoft and Behaviour Interactive migrated game server infrastructures to the cloud

      Hear from Ubisoft (For Honor) and Behaviour Interactive (Dead By Daylight) the technical considerations and steps involved on how AWS services like Amazon GameLift delivers low latency game experiences. Learn how GameLift can help developers scale high-performance game servers to meet player demand at scale. In this session, developers will get a clear understanding of what is required to setup and run game server infrastructure, leveraging Amazon EC2 Spot to maximize cost savings compared to on-prem solutions and minimizing player latency. This session is for any developer looking for a fully managed solution or shifting an existing infrastructure to the cloud.

      Speakers: Laurent Chouinard, Online Project Lead, For Honor, Ubisoft

      Fadi Beyrouti, Head of Technology, Behaviour Interactive

      Bruce Brown, Sr Software Development Manager, Amazon GameLift

    • Managing the Mayhem: Borderlands 3 Online Services with AWS

      Learn how Gearbox Software’s SHiFT services team used AWS to help prepare for their biggest and most successful release ever, Borderlands 3. This presentation will explore best practices regarding launch preparation and incident management for online AAA titles.

      Speakers: Caleb Tote, DevOps Technical Director, Gearbox Software

      Comb Hua, Director of Platform, Gearbox Software

    • AI Dungeon - Serving a 5GB ML model for 400K players

      In this session, learn how two indie developers, Nick and Alan Walton, used Amazon Aurora, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Alexa, and Twitch to launch and scale one of the most GPU-intensive games ever created...a text adventure. In AI Dungeon, players can enter any action imaginable and each action brings a unique response generated by OpenAI's 5GB GPT-2 language model, making infinite adventures a reality.

      Speakers: Alan Walton, Founder, Oasis Tech Inc

      Nick Walton, Founder, Oasis Tech Inc

      Tabitha Graves, Developer Relations Manager, AWS Game Tech

    • Pushing the boundaries of voice RPGs – A retrospective on Starfinder

      The Alexa Games team will present lessons learned creating the voice role playing game Starfinder: Dead Suns. Adapted from the tabletop RPG of the same name, reps from Alexa Games and Audible will discuss the design, production, launch, and lessons learned from this adaptation.

      Speakers: Chris Morrow, Sr Producer, Alexa Games

      Ezra Kim, Software Engineer, Alexa Games

      Jared Bartlett, Audio Lead and Senior Sound Designer, Clean Cuts Interactive

Closing Remarks

In the closing remarks, Tabitha Graves, AWS Game Tech Community Enablement Manager, wraps the day with new resources to continue learning, how to stay connected with the AWS Game Tech community, and more.

Demos

  • CI/CD pipeline for containerized game servers

    The biggest challenge faced by game publishers is the ability to deliver new features to players as quickly as possible. Not only do new features have to arrive quickly and reliably, but they also need to be delivered in a way that optimizes costs and maintains security. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines with GitOps is an effective way for game publishers to improve games and deliver new features throughout the development lifecycle. In this demo we’ll discuss how CD pipelines when combined with GitOps best practices can be used to automate the distribution of game binaries and their assets. 

  • Databases 101

    This demo provides an overview of the purpose-built AWS databases. We will walk through common use cases and how to choose the right tool for the right job. 

  • Accelerated networking 101

    Learn about a core networking services called AWS Global Accelerator and how it can help you speed up your internet traffic for online multiplayer games by leveraging AWS's global infrastructure.

  • Content delivery 101

    Learn about a core networking service for content delviery Amazon CloudFront, and it can help you get game binaries to your customers more quickly by leveraging AWS's global infrastructure.

  • Amazon Lumberyard 101

    This demo will provide customers with an introduction to the Lumberyard power tools available to build a game. The key features include world building with Slices, Script Canvas for scripting game logic and EMotion FX for controlling character animation.

  • Serverless Analytics 101

    Learn why you want to use analytics in a video game. Learn how to build out a batch and near real-time analytics pipeline and integrate it into a Unity game to get useful insights. 

  • Amazon GameLift game servers 101

    A walkthrough of common game architecture patterns with Amazon GameLift and explore an example in the GameLift console. 

  • Cross-Play games on AWS

    Cross-platform play is the ability to allow different gaming platforms to share the same online servers in a game, allowing gamers to join together. In this session, you'll find hint how to configure the backend of cross play games on AWS, along with a sample architecture. 

  • Extend AWS data centers to anywhere

    The talk covers subjects of how to move the cloud workloads closer to end users. What mechanisms like AWS Local zones, AWS Outposts and AWS Wavelength are and which use cases those cover. 

  • Building an ML Powered Abuse Detection Pipeline with Amazon SageMaker

    While detecting cheaters can often be an uphill battle, systems trained using machine learning algorithms can help leverage the data game developers already have in order to automate escalation and action against cases of suspicious behavior. In this demo, we'll showcase what it looks like to build an end to end pipeline with example player telemetry data.

  • Alexa, create an adventure

    Hear about how Alexa's RPG Experience, Starfinder was created. The demo covers an introduction to the game, and demo of Alexa Skill creating tool, Skill Flow Builder.

  • Create in-game music with machine learning

    Machine learning isn't just for data analysis - you can use it to help create content for your games as well! Join this demo to see how to use AWS DeepComposer to try out new variations on musical themes regardless of your level of technical expertise -- and then dive deeper to see how generative adversarial networks and Amazon SageMaker can be used to build content for your game even at runtime. 

  • Land a rocket with reinforcement learning

    This demo will show how Game Developers can use reinforcement learning (RL) in their video games. In this demo, we will demonstrate how to use RL to train a lunar lander vehicle in an OpenAI Gym Box2D simulation environment to land itself on the moon. Learn to train and optimize an agents, and compete against others to see who can create the most optimized RL model that can land on the moon accurately.  

  • Studio in the cloud for asset creation

    Create game assets in the cloud with applications such as Epic Games Unreal Engine, Autodesk 3dsMax, Adobe Photoshop, and AWS Thinkbox Sequoia. Connect to a G4DN-based Windows virtual workstation via the AWS' NICE DCV remote display protocol and interact with applications using all input devices including mouse, keyboard, and a Wacom tablet.

  • Visualizing and Querying Knowledge Graphs from an MMORPG with Amazon Neptune

    Graph databases are an immensely valuable tool for understanding highly interrelated data, but most developers are not used to modeling and querying data with graph database tools. This demo showcases an in-browser visualization and query explorer built on top of Apache Tinkerpop Gremlin and Amazon Neptune, with a dataset from a wildly popular MMORPG. 

  • Building community engagement on Twitch

    Live streaming on Twitch brings communities together, providing game developers with a unique opportunity to build engagement for these audiences. Discover the versatility of Twitch Extensions during our hands-on demonstration and recognize the interactive potential of your game during live broadcasts.

  • Automate code review with machine learning

    Discover the many uses of machine learning to build tools which automate skilled but repetitive manual work. We introduce Amazon CodeGuru, a machine learning powered tool, which automates code review. We look at how it works, what it can do, and then investigate with a demo. 

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