[GOOGLE LOGO MUSIC]
TODD KERPEMAN: I am here at the gaming garage with Darren
Hilton, checking out what is sure to be the next great head
game MechaHamster.
Hi, Darren.
DARREN HILTON: Hi Todd, how are you doing?
TODD KERPEMAN: Good.
Now the last time I saw MechaHamster,
it did not have this multiplayer component
that I'm seeing going on behind me.
What's going on here?
DARREN HILTON: So this is a project that we did with Cloud.
And so we decided to incorporate the Agones Open Match
open source projects into MechaHamster.
TODD KERPEMAN: What are those?
Start with Open Match.
DARREN HILTON: So Open Match is a framework for connecting
clients to our game servers.
TODD KERPEMAN: Gotcha.
Meaning that if you've got a bunch of players that
want to play a multiplayer game together,
I would use Open Match to help connect them based
on what kind of criteria--
DARREN HILTON: Based on the criteria that you lay out,
their skill level, that kind of thing.
You can go in and kind of dig in and give that criteria.
TODD KERPEMAN: So that kind of helps
solve the problem of finding people
that actually want to play--
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
TODD KERPEMAN: --with maybe the same skill
level or are in the same general area,
have good network latency.
DARREN HILTON: Exactly, exactly.
TODD KERPEMAN: Excellent.
DARREN HILTON: You don't want to have that experience where
you have low level players being connected with high level
players and then getting a bad game experience.
TODD KERPEMAN: And then Agones.
What is that?
DARREN HILTON: So Agones is a multiplayer gaming server
application that's built on Kubernetes.
TODD KERPEMAN: OK.
And so I know there's a lot of multiplayer game servers
out there.
What makes Agones special?
DARREN HILTON: So Agones is special in that it can scale
to the needs of your game.
So if you wanted to add thousands of servers--
TODD KERPEMAN: You mean when MechaHamster becomes a megahit?
DARREN HILTON: When it becomes--
TODD KERPEMAN: We've got millions and millions
of people playing?
DARREN HILTON: And we totally expect that to happen.
TODD KERPEMAN: Of course.
DARREN HILTON: It's going to happen.
The other thing too is that it's cloud agnostic.
It's an open source project.
You can run it on any cloud service you want.
You can run it locally.
You could run it in your own on frame in your own service.
TODD KERPEMAN: On-prem?
DARREN HILTON: Yes, on-prem.
TODD KERPEMAN: And so, because it's based on Kubernetes,
it can scale to sort of--
DARREN HILTON: It can scale.
TODD KERPEMAN: Basically, until I
run out of servers or until Google runs out of servers,
which is going to take a while.
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
And everything you need for that server
is contained in that Kubernetes container.
TODD KERPEMAN: Gotcha.
And so now with a dedicated game server like Agones,
I know sometimes in multiplayer games, particularly mobile
ones, you'll have the clients talking to each other
directly in like a peer to peer network.
What makes a dedicated game server better?
DARREN HILTON: So a dedicated game server
gives you the added level of security,
in that that's a sort of truth.
And the scalability is another thing.
So you can scale to however you want it to scale,
to the needs of your game.
And a peer to peer network is relatively limited in that--
generally limited to a smaller amount of clients.
TODD KERPEMAN: You can't have 100 clients all talking.
DARREN HILTON: Can't have 100 clients.
TODD KERPEMAN: That would just--
That poor one client that's acting as your, like, server
for that episode.
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
Somebody could mess with that.
It could lose its game state.
There's a lot of things can go wrong with that.
TODD KERPEMAN: Gotcha.
I'm guessing latency is probably more likely to be consistent,
because you're not relying on that one client
to be the server for the entire game.
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
TODD KERPEMAN: Gotcha.
All right.
And then I couldn't help but notice
you were wearing a very stylish Firebase t-shirt.
So Firebase is integrated in this game as well?
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
So we're using a bunch of Firebase products.
We're using Authentication, Cloud Messaging, Remote Config,
Realtime Database and Crashlytics.
TODD KERPEMAN: Oh, Crashlytics.
That's new, right?
DARREN HILTON: New as of GDC, yes.
TODD KERPEMAN: All right.
And is this running on Unity?
DARREN HILTON: It's run on Unity.
TODD KERPEMAN: And so now Crashlytics
for Unity will actually let me, as a developer,
find out if there are crashes in my game
and where they're happening.
DARREN HILTON: Exactly.
So you can go through, find your stack trace,
and then narrow in on the bugs that are affecting your game.
TODD KERPEMAN: Gotcha.
And have you found lots of crashes in and MechaHamster?
DARREN HILTON: Of course not.
TODD KERPEMAN: Well, of course, because it is solid code.
DARREN HILTON: Rock solid.
TODD KERPEMAN: Rock solid code that never crashes.
And with Remote Config, I know one of the fun things of Remote
Config, especially as a game developer,
is like you find some level is too hard
or some setting is too difficult,
you can basically kind of tweak that
and all your clients get updated on the fly.
DARREN HILTON: You can turn, that yes.
And you can roll out to all your clients,
but you can roll out to a segment of players as well.
TODD KERPEMAN: Like for running an A/B test?
DARREN HILTON: Yes, exactly.
You can test that.
And if it's stable, then you can roll out a different one
as well.
TODD KERPEMAN: If I wanted to try out MechaHamster at home,
how would I be able to do that?
DARREN HILTON: You can download the single player game
from the Play Store or from the App Store.
TODD KERPEMAN: All right.
And last question, were any hamsters
harmed in the making of MechaHamster?
DARREN HILTON: I believe not.
TODD KERPEMAN: All right.
That's always good to hear.
[GOOGLE LOGO MUSIC]