Keep on gaming! Leaseweb helps Sunset Games’ Tank Fighter stay on target with 100% uptime

A guestblog By Shay Hugi, CEO of Sunset Games.

Picture this. You are a tank gunner chasing an elusive enemy. Finally you have them cornered. You take aim to blow them to smithereens… And your screen stutters and freezers. Not good. That’s why we chose Leaseweb to make sure that does not happen to any of our players.

The gaming industry is exploding! The industry is predicted to record 9% yearly growth through 2013 to exceed $76 billion. There is an ever-growing demand for bigger, more collaborative real-time online games. Answering this call, we’ve deployed our new game Tank Fighter which is a real-time, fully synchronous, multiplayer action game. It is currently available globally to over 100,000 monthly active users via Facebook.

For game developers, it’s common knowledge that a good relationship with your hosting provider is nothing less than essential. When we first came into contact with Leaseweb, Tank Fighter was at the very early planning stages. We needed to extend the reach of Tank Fighter so gamers on Facebook could ‘fire’ from anywhere in the world! To do that, we needed a partner who had the bandwidth and capacity to keep our game up and running anytime – all the time.

Tank Fighter requires real-time updates within gameplay and issues like network latency can seriously affect a player’s score – and a tank fighter’s morale. For example, when a missile is fired, high latency levels might cause two players to see it at different times – no one wants to get caught in crossfire and lose a game because the connection was slow!

Our challenge was therefore to create a smooth-running, multiplayer, real-time network game, with delays kept to a bare minimum. We also need the flexibility to grow our reach as the number of global users expanded. In fact, the number of tank fighters have grown and Leaseweb has helped our mini Facebook army!

With this in mind, we worked closely with Leaseweb in the early stages to create a solid brief. Leaseweb wanted to understand both where our business currently was, and – perhaps even more importantly – what the plans were for the next twelve to eighteen months. With this space evolving as quickly as it does, this was particularly important as it allowed us to work with Leaseweb to provision a future-proof solution.

Between us, we developed a solution incorporating dedicated servers, all connected to a top of rack switch. All servers are interconnected to minimize network congestion and maximize throughput, enabling the game applications to run at optimum speed, providing premium gameplay for the end-users. Leaseweb provided us with a free ‘try before you buy’ phase for one month. We ran a number of trials to make sure that we – excuse the pun – were firing on all cylinders! And the best news? We were! With the try before you buy phase complete, we signed up, and haven’t looked back!

As for the results, since choosing Leaseweb, complaints are almost non-existent and we have over 100,000+ registered players. We have enjoyed 100% uptime, as well as rapid responses to all inquiries.

Thanks to Leaseweb infrastructure, we’ve focused on adding more missions and gameplay functions to make Tank Fighter even more exciting like 1 vs. 3 modes, flag capture and timed game options. We are adding more maps and more weapons every month – all of which mean the action is more explosive than ever!

 

You can check out the trailer for Tank Fighter on YouTube here and don’t forget; if you need a reliable, responsive infrastructure provider, offering fantastic network abilities coupled with extremely low latency rates – get in touch with Leaseweb!