Blankhans Creates Persistent Worlds with AccelByte Game Backend

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore is a social survival sandbox game that invites players to venture into the world of Tormentosia, a land torn apart by the evil Sorgoth and his powerful armies.

Blankhans was founded in April 2021 by Markus Schneider, Hauke Gerdes, and René Rieck in Munich, Germany. Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore is their first game.

Challenges

With a background in infrastructure, specifically game server hosting, the founders of Blankhans had high standards when it came to selecting a partner for server orchestration. They needed a partner with in-house expertise in creating and maintaining a persistent world state for players.

"From previous experiences, backend infrastructure has always been a crucial element for a game’s success" - René Rieck, Co-Founder

Building a large backend team wasn’t feasible but Blankhans was able to hire a small, highly efficient team that could focus solely on the unique and custom aspects of their backend, building off of what the Accelbyte Gaming Services platform offered out of the box.

Solutions

Blankhans wanted a cost-effective solution to handle the backend, allowing them to focus on their game. CEO and Co-Founder Markus Schneider heard about AccelByte from peers in the industry who were working with AccelByte.

Multiplayer

Coreborn is a multiplayer open-world survival RPG, with crafting and base-building elements to help you combat the enemies scattered around the map. Players will need to hunt for resources, craft new weapons and equipment, face down deadly creatures, and survive (solo or with allies) the wilderness ahead of them. There are several distinct multiplayer modes available for the game.

A 50-player session mode called Coreheim acts as a hub world that players initially spawn into before joining their survival world. Coreheim is the capital city of the world that connects the whole game population. Players can later go back to this Coreheim hub world to meet other players, get new resources, and trade items.

A 20-player session mode called Survival runs in a special mode as Persistent Session. In the Survival session, players and their friends have free-range over a huge map with a rich AI environment. Players can build bases and structures, farm resources and equipment, and fight enemies.

With AccelByte's Persistent Session feature combined with Blankhans own World Service, players are free to leave this world and rejoin whenever they wish without losing any player progress. The World Service is an AWS Lambda and saved games are saved in an S3 storage.

Players are allocated to a persistent world close to them for low latency. The system allows for backfilling existing servers so that servers are less likely to die while they secure a CCU margin to leave space for existing players to join. In addition, the persistent survival instances are always online so that the servers can also simulate weather conditions and the deterioration of buildings while players are offline.

Cloud Save

AccelByte's cloud saving allowed Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore to save items like player-created buildings or in-game events to world states so that they have ‘persistent play’ for their users.

Matchmaking and Session Service

AccelByte’s matchmaking lets players leave and reconnect to sessions as needed to give a feeling of a persistent world where they can join and play with friends without interruption. After joining a hub session, players can join a Survival world via a Portal in the town square. By combining a custom World Service with AccelByte’s Session Management service, players are able to spin up their previous Survival session by matching their saved World ID against the Session Service, letting them rejoin their previously played worlds and continue their progression with no matchmaking required. If no previous sessions are found, players then go through the Matchmaking service to find the closest server and spawn into it with ease.

Working with Cloud Save, Session Service lets players assign worlds to each session. You can load the existing world state to a new server while we take care of the game server's health and lifecycle.

AMS

Accelbyte Multiplayer Server (AMS) efficiently preloads and manages game servers in the regions Blankhans specified to ensure players can always access geographically close servers. This approach optimizes network performance, allowing players to enjoy the best gaming experience. One of their requirements was to leverage AWS credits they received as part of the AWS Activate program towards Amazon EC2 compute costs. We supported having AMS spin-up instances in their AWS account even though the Accelbyte game backend platform is hosted and managed within the Accelbyte AWS master account.

LiveOps and Support

Blankhans had the full support of the AccelByte team every step of the way. One of the team's focus areas was gearing up for the game’s launch.

AccelByte supports launch readiness with internal playtesting to obtain gameplay critical path; infra sizing, security test, and service configuration; war room schedules, logs, and channel preparation; and regular syncs. AccelByte pulled resources from every part of AGS to support Blankhans as needed. From technical producers to LiveOps, to our core-os team, and more.

AccelByte provided us with a set of tools to not only operate and monitor our Infrastructure. It enables our Customer Support to resolve requests themselves. - René Rieck, Co-Founder

Blankhans could focus more on development as AccelByte supported them during the war room period and beyond into a post-launch review. During this time, our team works closely with their community manager and developers, monitoring issues and taking action if any issues are raised.

Results

Blankhans was able to focus developer resources on building the game's unique world and mechanics rather than the backend.

Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore’s initial alpha users reached and exceeded 1000 players. Early Access Beta scaled up to 5000 CCU, currently sitting at about 600 CCU after the Open Beta being open for two hours.

Being an early access title Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore has built a passionate Discord server with players participating in the game's development.

Congratulations to the entire Blankhans team on the successful early access launch of Coreborn: Nations of the Ultracore. You can check it out on Steam today.

From matchmaking to persistent world states, AccelByte Gaming Services can handle your games' backend so you can focus on making the game, request a demo to learn more.