Rayark: Launching better social games faster
About Rayark
Rayark is a team of game developers dedicated to creating high-quality gaming experiences and digital content on various platforms, including mobile. Its six major games have been downloaded 60 million times worldwide.
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Contact usBy moving to Google Cloud Platform and using Google Kubernetes Engine to power the backend of its popular games, Rayark is developing games faster and offering better experiences to gamers around the world.
Google Cloud Platform Results
- Player information downloads more quickly, leading to faster startup
- Accelerates development and Improves game play
- Developers can focus on creating games, not managing infrastructure
When Taiwan-based game maker Rayark decided to switch its focus from standalone games to mobile games with social components, it needed infrastructure to support creating network-enabled games for iOS and Android. To deploy software faster and more easily while using fewer resources, Rayark chose a new way to deploy games—using containers.
More than
60 million downloads worldwide
“We chose containers for the main part of our technology stack because with it we can build a continuous integration pipeline and deploy to our publisher’s platform in China,” says Alvin Chung, CTO and Co-founder of Rayark. “That makes it much easier to launch new games, and maintain and revise existing ones.”
“Our previous cloud provider simply wasn’t reliable enough for us, so we had to come up with an alternative. Google Cloud Platform has accelerated our development process because it’s easy to use and has an excellent management console.”
—Alvin Chung, CTO and Co-founder, RayarkInitially, Rayark used another cloud provider in concert with container technology, but ran into problems. Rayark found the documentation incomplete and difficult to understand. Deployment sometimes failed. And because of routing issues in Taiwan, Rayark’s bandwidth was slow and limited. Rayark chose Google Cloud Platform because it scales quickly to meet demand, offers sophisticated analytics tools, and works well with Kubernetes open source software for deployment.
“Our previous cloud provider simply wasn’t reliable enough for us, so we had to come up with an alternative,” says Alvin. “Google Cloud Platform has accelerated our development process because it’s easy to use and has an excellent management console.”
Building better games
Since Rayark was already using Kubernetes container management technology, it immediately knew switching to Google Kubernetes Engine was a smart decision. After all, Google developed Kubernetes, made it open source, and donated it to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Kubernetes Engine is built on top of Kubernetes, so the two technologies work seamlessly together.
Rayark uses Kubernetes Engine to store and retrieve user-generated data including player scores and all user interactions with its games. The information is used to create user profiles and leaderboards. Data is a key component in the social aspect of Rayark games because it lets users see each other’s profiles and add each other as friends. Social gaming engages people more than playing standalone games, and leads to increased time spent playing them. In the future, Rayark will also use Kubernetes Engine to create and host anti-cheating and anti-cracking algorithms.
“Google Kubernetes Engine is a key component of our move to network and social games. We believe it will help set us apart from ordinary mobile gaming because people are looking for ways to connect with one another when they play.”
—Alvin Chung, CTO and Co-founder, RayarkAccelerating development, improving game play
Rayark has gained considerable benefits from Google Cloud Platform. When users log in to games, their information downloads quickly from Google Cloud Storage—so they can start playing social games immediately, find friends, and interact. And by freeing engineers from managing infrastructure, Google Cloud Platform has allowed Rayark to keep its development staff small.
“With Google Cloud Platform, we can focus on development and improving gaming performance, and not have to worry about managing the platform itself,” adds Alvin.
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About Rayark
Rayark is a team of game developers dedicated to creating high-quality gaming experiences and digital content on various platforms, including mobile. Its six major games have been downloaded 60 million times worldwide.