AccelByte Powers Stray Bombay's The Anacrusis Journey

Stray Bombay is a new studio in Seattle made up of industry vets making cooperative games. Led by Valve alum Chet Faliszek, the studio's goal is to create games that better reflect players' desires for social experiences.

Released in January, The Anacrusis is a four-player, cooperative first-person shooter set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. From Stray Bombay, "Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!"

Challenges

When Stray Bombay first started out they had the impressive goal of shipping a game with crossplay on five client platforms with a team of only a handful of engineers.

In order to achieve their goal for The Anacrusis Stray Bombay needed a backend. Challenges included:

• Creating a strong social experience is the core of The Anacrusis.
• To enact this vision, The Anacrusis needed to support cross-platform parties and matchmaking.

Beyond their launch, Stray Bombay has big aspirations, with an aggressive content plan spanning multiple seasons of content, building a matchmaking framework based on player compatibility instead of skill, adding deep support for user-created mods, and lots more.

"When we started prototyping The Anacrusis we knew that seamless multiplayer had to be a priority. But it would have taken a massive investment in backend engineers to implement and maintain ourselves. Finding a backend partner made more sense for our small indie team. AccelByte brings high level services down to the indie level, allowing us to offer the Triple-A experience that players have come to expect from live service games built by much larger teams. Their willingness to proactively dedicate resources to helping us hit our aggressive schedule lets Stray Bombay punch far above our weight." - Chet Faliszek, CEO and Co-Founder of Stray Bombay

Solutions

AccelByte provides Stray Bombay with:

• User Account Management: a secure identity and access management system that allows developers to build a direct relationship with their players.
• Matchmaking: assemble players to battle aliens in real-time
• Data Ownership: to access all data directly, without co-mingling The Anacrusis player data with other games' data.
• Party Codes: Using party codes gets players in the game faster, regardless of their platform.
• Armada: Game Servers across multiple regions to reduce player latency and facilitate speedy cross-play.
• Vivox Voice Chat: integration in Game Lobby.
• Play Testing: with individual players on the internet, using party codes in the development backend of the actual game that is being shipped.
• Game Telemetry: monitoring player behavior will shape the direction of future content for the game.

Results

After implementing AccelByte's services, Stray Bombay has:

• Simultaneously launched The Anacrusis with cross-platform play on five platforms: Steam, Epic Game Store, and Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and Windows 10.
• Made The Anacrusis available as part of Xbox Game Pass.
• Taken full advantage of direct data ownership to shape the future of the game.

"AccelByte has been instrumental in helping us get The Anacrusis ready to ship. With multiple server options available, we have a high degree of confidence about our ability to scale through launch and beyond." - Chet Faliszek, CEO and Co-Founder of Stray Bombay

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