Going Serverless in Game Development Using AWS with Odyssey Interactive

Odyssey Interactive focuses on competitive multiplayer experiences aimed at the upcoming generation of gamers. Its debut title, Omega Strikers, which was launched in April 2023, combines air hockey and anime to create an exciting three-on-three battle arena—called a footbrawler—where the teams try to score goals. The multiplayer, cross-platform game focuses heavily on its characters, encouraging players to choose their team of anime-styled Strikers, each with its own unique abilities and custom designs. “I would say Omega Strikers is anime air hockey,” says Eric Lawless, tech founder of Odyssey Interactive. “But fundamentally, you’re playing Pong.”

Before the game entered the development phase, the team at Odyssey had already decided that it would not spend its time and resources on acquiring and managing the required infrastructure. Instead, Odyssey would adopt fully managed services. “If there is a way for us to not spend as many people working on infrastructure and deployment as we have to work on features for the game, that is ideal,” says Lawless.

After Odyssey experimented with several solutions, it decided to use AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets companies run code for virtually any type of application or backend service, and Amazon GameLift, a low-latency and low-cost multiplayer game hosting solution that scales with fluctuating player demand. “The serverless stuff has been great,” says Lawless. “Not only do we not need to own this actual computer somewhere, but we can also scale very rapidly based on our precise needs at the time.”

Using fully managed services has created the efficiency that Odyssey Interactive envisioned when choosing its approach to infrastructure. “There’s virtually a whole class of work that we just don’t need to do,” says Christopher Shankland, chief technology officer of Odyssey Interactive. “It would have taken a whole person to manage infrastructure at the scale at which we are doing it.” For a team of three people, that additional work would have meant increasing the game development timeline by 33 percent.

To build the API layer of the game, the team chose Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it simple for developers to create, maintain, and secure APIs at virtually any scale. Since many aspects of the architecture are automatically managed for them, the developers have more time to focus on addressing in-game problems, thus reducing server downtime and playability issues. The agility of the serverless infrastructure helps the team deploy game updates quickly, so players do not have to wait through tedious maintenance times. “Our time to make a change live can be as short as 4 or 5 minutes,” says Shankland. “When you own your data centers, deploying updates is typically measured in hours, and we measure it in minutes.”

Using AWS infrastructure, Omega Strikers can reach an international audience, and the player base has grown rapidly. With users around the world matching up to play against each other, having a low-latency solution to handle high traffic is crucial for Odyssey Interactive. Using Amazon GameLift addresses those needs, because the managed servers automatically place players on the lowest-latency server instance available. “We can literally push a button, and now the game runs in Japan, or Singapore, or Europe,” says Shankland. “For our game, which is very latency dependent, that is a requirement. It simply would not work to have a server or data center in the United States and have someone play from the other side of the globe.”

Odyssey Interactive also emphasized having observability in its infrastructure, because being able to see everything in-game in near real time is crucial. In one instance, the development team used the monitoring capabilities of Amazon API Gateway to solve an unforeseen problem that arose when the game went live before its scheduled launch time.

“The day before the launch, we were doing some final load testing to make sure things were all right,” recalls Lawless. “Due to a possible misconfiguration, one of our platforms decided to launch the video game a day early across the world. Thanks to the observability, we were able to see all the people on the platform online. So, we just scaled the game up, turned on all the necessary servers, and let people create accounts and log in.” Due to the scalability of its infrastructure, Odyssey Interactive could improvise a solution within 30 minutes of discovering the anomaly and make the game live for all its users.