The Callisto Protocol Escapes with AccelByte Backend

From the mind of Glen Schofield – creator of Dead Space and other award-winning games – comes The Callisto Protocol, developed by Striking Distance Studios (SDS) and published by KRAFTON. The Callisto Protocol is Striking Distance Studios' first game, released in December 2022.

This all-new story-driven survival horror game is set in the year 2320 and challenges its players to take on the role of Jacob Lee, an inmate of the horrific Black Iron Prison – a maximum-security penitentiary located on Jupiter’s dead moon, Callisto. In one of the universe's most hostile and isolated environments, Jacob’s fellow inmates begin to turn into monstrous creatures, forcing him to safely escape Black Iron Prison before it’s too late.

Using a unique blend of shooting and close-quarters combat, Jacob will need to adapt his tactics to combat the rapidly evolving creatures while scavenging to unlock new weapons, gear, and abilities to outrun the growing threat and escape the horrors of Jupiter's Dead Moon, while also uncovering the dark and disturbing truths buried beneath the surface of Callisto.

"A lot of people will ask ‘why do you need a partner like AccelByte for a single player game'. Any game created in the last few years needs tools for player identification, build management, performance telemetry, and cross save . It's become a standard that all players expect and developers need to build. Having a company like AccelByte have out of the box solutions in this space was a huge help." - Mark James, CTO of Striking Distance Studios

Challenges

Developing any game is a challenge, but developing your first game ever is a whole different ball game. So, needless to say, when developing The Callisto Protocol on their own, Striking Distance encountered a few challenges.

The first was the need to integrate a crash reporter so that they could capture crashes and improve production quality. Next in line was integrating identity and telemetry for CPU/GPU performance metrics analysis. What’s more, in order for Striking Distance to show aggregated information for any build or changelists, they needed to build a custom dashboard for things like crashes, autotest results, performance, etc. Their need for a better way to distribute internally and even externally also proved to be a challenge due to the nature of the current mechanism and their need for better coverage on Autotest for Editor and Packages Builds.

"Building a game releasing across five platforms with hundreds of changes made every day quickly becomes a huge logistics problem in managing data. AccelByte Development Toolkit enabled Striking Distance Studios to quickly analyze output from build systems alongside autotest and crash data in a single web accessible portal." - Mark James, CTO of Striking Distance Studios

Solutions

KRAFTON ID Linking

We helped Striking Distance implement KRAFTON ID linking in which users can seamlessly link their platform account to KRAFTON ID. Users can even log in to KRAFTON ID to get the exclusive Striking Distance founder’s pack. By linking their platform accounts to KRAFTON ID, users are granted access to an added benefit of security for their game identity. Users may also be granted a reward for linking their platform accounts to KRAFTON ID and can claim exclusive Snake character and weapon skins when the game launches.

Cloud Saves Cross-Platform Progression

Striking Distance also wanted their users to be able to continue playing The Callisto Protocol on different devices. For instance, if a user plays the game on their PlayStation 4, saves the game, and shuts down the console, when they then relocate to another PlayStation 4 and start the game again, their expectation is that they should be able to resume their saved game from the other console on this new console.

To help SDS with saving progression for cross-platform gaming, their users should have both their PSN and Steam accounts linked to their KRAFTON ID. The user then plays the game on their PlayStation 4, saves the game, and shuts down the console. Next, the user loads the game in Steam with the expectation that they are able to load their game from the cross-platform cloud save as they have their KRAFTON ID linked.

Entitlements

In order to export and import entitlements using CSV formatted documents, SDS enlisted our entitlement services. Now, rewards are given to users after successfully linking to their Krafton ID and becoming a full account with the data stored in the backend services with notifications received after the rewards are granted.

Game Analytics

Krafton rewrote the AccelByte game telemetry service from Python to Golang, but the interface (endpoints) are the same. Krafton now has the capability to send both game-specific client and server telemetries to be further processed by Krafton’s analytic pipeline. We’ve given Krafton the capability to store their telemetry locally when offline and send it to the server when the user is back online to ensure key telemetries are not missed. Additionally, this service can be used on multiple projects, not just TCP.

AccelByte Development Toolkit

Striking Distance Studios uses AccelByte Development Toolkit to capture crashes from their game. Using ADT, we’ve helped them create the automation test and visualize the test result. ADT has been used as a build distribution tool replacing Unreal Game Sync internally and to other studios.

To learn more about AccelByte’s solutions, request a demo here.