Last Year. Undaunted.

Challenge

Asymmetric survival horror, Last Year, had been sunsetted by its previous owner due to bankruptcy. Undaunted Games came in to save the game’s day and were looking for a partner who could resurrect Last Year for relaunch. A major factor in this challenge was the deprecation of GameSparks and the need for Last Year to move to a new backend service.

Why us

Choosing the right migration partner is crucial for any game developer, especially when faced with a sudden shutdown of their current platform. It’s important to find a reliable and competent partner who can ensure a seamless transition, minimising the impact on players.

Code Wizards are trusted tech partners of multiple backend/liveops suppliers, meaning we are as platform- and tech-agnostic as possible, making the right recommendation for the game, not our wallets.

Our reputation within the industry, especially for zero-downtime migrations, helped Undaunted Games make the decision to bring us on board to help resurrect this hugely popular title.

Solution

We ported server-side code to Nakama, leveraging our Shim translation layer to reuse the GameSparks code, ensuring compatibility within Nakama. This streamlined the testing process by using the same GameSparks code, rather than necessitating a complete rewrite for a new platform.

The migration was completed in two steps – a gradual trickle migration, which allowed for zero downtime – a huge boost for Undaunted Games, expediting the time to launch. We tested it in Closed Beta, and once everything was confirmed as working, we performed a Big Bang Migration! This entailed migrating all of the data from GameSparks to Nakama.

Huge migration, minimal fuss. All thanks to the bespoke migration tools developed by Code Wizards’ battle-hardened engineers.

Outcome

The transition to Nakama ushered in many improvements and benefits for Undaunted Games. With a gradual trickle migration, there was no downtime experienced, ensuring a smooth and seamless process reducing the game’s time to market.

The end result? A successful relaunch on Steam. On top of that, we ported their netcode for multiplayer, rewriting from a Steam-only code to allow for future cross-network play. So console players, keep your eyes peeled!

After the migration, Code Wizards continued to provide analytics pipelines to ensure Undaunted are able to make data-driven decisions about their game and players’ gameplay.