Vancouver Unity Games + Google + Scaling Unity Dedicated Game Servers

Hi Devs!

Now that winter and GDC is over, it's time for us to come out of hibernation. We have a treat in store for you at our next Meetup. A very special guest, Mark Mandel, from Google will be visiting Vancouver! We are also very thankful that A Thinking Ape will be hosting our next Meetup.

Agenda:
6:00 pm - Doors open & registration
6:30 pm - Presentation begins
7:15 pm - Q&A
7:30 pm - Networking begins
9:00 pm - Event ends

Presentation:

"Scaling Unity Dedicated Game Servers with Open Source"

Awesome! You’ve built the next Overwatch! You have your game client, and your dedicated game server to power each of these game sessions as your players duke it out in your new amazing PvP tournament, or MOBA death match. Now you’ve just got to write code to spin up a game server for each match, power up machines to run those game servers, autoscale them based on server load, handle log aggregation, health checking, deploying new versions of your game servers, and…

Wow. That’s a lot.

The good news is, there are open source projects that can solve almost all the problems outlined above, for both dedicated game servers as well as their supporting applications, such as matchmaking and account management. Namely software containers with Docker and the Kubernetes project to help orchestrate them.

Kubernetes allows us to take advantage of the abstraction that containers provides over any kind of software, and thereby gives us common solutions for deployment, health checking, logging, scaling and more. In this talk we will look at the basics of how these two projects work, and how they can be used to scale, and autoscale, both our game servers and their supporting infrastructure, with relatively low effort compared to coding this infrastructure by hand. Finally we will run a Unity based multiplayer game on our newly built infrastructure, so you can see it all in action!

About the presenter:
Mark Mandel is a Developer Advocate for Games for Google Cloud Platform and one half of the Google Cloud Platform Podcast. Hailing from Australia, Mark built his career developing backend systems for over 15 years and authoring and contributing to several widely adopted open source projects. When he’s not building infrastructure in the cloud for games, he’s constantly looking for new and interesting things he can do with Docker containers, playing with his dog and reading too much fantasy literature.

About the venue:
A Thinking Ape is a Vancouver game studio located at 1132 Alberni Street.

To get into the building, enter on Alberni Street. Go up the stairs located to right of the "jungle". When you reach the registration desk follow the signs to the meet up.

See you there!