Design of a horizontally scalable backend application for online games

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Perustieteiden korkeakoulu | Master's thesis
Date
2016-10-27
Department
Major/Subject
Christian Cardin
Mcode
SCI3045
Degree programme
Master's Programme in Mobile Computing - Services and Security
Language
en
Pages
6+83
Series
Abstract
Mobile game market is increasing in popularity year after year, attracting a wide audience of independent developers who must endure the competition of other more resourceful game companies. Players expect high quality games and experiences, while developers strive to monetize. Researches have shown a correlation between some features of a game and its likelihood to succeed and be a potential candidate to enter the top grossing lists. This thesis focuses on identifying the trending features found on the current most successful games, and proposes the design of a scalable, flexible and modular backend application which integrates all the services needed for fulfilling the common needs of a mobile online game. A microservice oriented architecture have been used as a basis for the system design, leading to a modular decomposition of features into small, independent, reusable services. The system and microservices design comply with the Reactive Manifesto, allowing the application to reach responsiveness, elasticity, resiliency and asynchronicity. For its properties, the application is suitable to serve on a cloud environment covering the requirements for small games and popular games with high load of traffic and many concurrent players. The thesis, in addition to the application and microservices design, includes a discussion on the technology stack for a possible implementation and recommended setup for three use case scenarios.
Description
Supervisor
Ylä-Jääski, Antti
Thesis advisor
Kämäräinen, Teemu
Virkkunen, Mikko
Keywords
scalability, online games, microservices, architectural design, backend application
Other note
Citation