Using Akka to boost gaming platform enrolment

Industry

Technology

Introduction

NashTech identified the extension points of gaming platform and recommended using Akka to distribute the games, leading to increase in enrolment and overdrive of tenant onboarding.

The mission of Innovation Games is to help organisations understand their customers and market conditions based on gameplay. Research shows that human beings have been hard-wired to express themselves and interact with each other through play. Engaging your customers, employees, and stakeholders through Innovation Games delivers deeper, more actionable insight than is available through those stodgy brainstorming sessions, online surveys, focus groups or other tools.

The challenge

Innovation Games was already very successful in their market when they came to NashTech. The challenge was that the platform worked on a single node and was not distributable. Different games were being run on different nodes, and sometimes due to the high load of tenants on the system, there were delays and lost moves which could put the game in a bad light. Moreover, to add more tenants to the system, it was evident that vertical scaling would not work.

The solution

NashTech understood the gaming platform, identified the extension points, and recommended using Akka to distribute the games. Once the architecture and design were accepted as a viable approach, NashTech built the distribution strategy ground up for converting Lift Actors to Akka actors where necessary and building a Lift-to-Akka bridge in other cases allowing all the strategy games to be distributed and ready to scale horizontally.

The outcome

Innovation games were able to get the distributed game grid out to the market for its customers, who loved the speed and efficiency of the game. The enrollment to the games increased, and the tenant onboarding went into overdrive. Technically now, the grid can scale to any number of nodes for each game depending on the need.