Supermoves. Makea Games.

Executive Summary

A launch day War Room, providing security and redundancy to indie developer, Makea Games, for the launch of their online multiplayer title, Supermoves.

The Challenge

Supermoves was Makea Games’ first multiplayer and their first on Unreal Engine. They had a great team in place but no in-house backend-specialist developers beyond their CTO. With such a streamlined team and no built-in redundancy, it was crucial to bring in support to handle things should anything break during the game’s launch.

Makea Games approached Code Wizards Group’s live service, multiplayer game specialists Multiplayer Wizards to form Makea’s launch day War Room.

Tomi Toikka, CEO for Makea Games, summed up the challenge as, “Crucially, at launch everything must work.”

Why Use Us?

Makea Games were recommended to Leave it to the Wizards by their contacts at Microsoft Finland. Supermoves was built on new and experimental tech so not only were Makea’s needs entirely bespoke, but they needed rapid deployment.

Cost-efficiencies and effective use of resources were the chief concerns among the Makea stakeholders, but after meeting the Multiplayer Wizards’ War Room team they felt reassured that what they had at their disposal were professionals who had been through this before and knew what they were doing.

“You really need that if you’re launching an indie multiplayer game. We felt loved and respected despite our size.” Toikka said, “After two and a half years spent making the game, we needed to ensure that nothing breaks.”

What was our Solution?

After a few days of consultancy, our solution was to deploy the Multiplayer Wizards team to ensure the Supermoves’ launch day went super-smooth. We implemented some additional metrics, alerting and visibility into the Supermoves backend, as well as introducing server scaling capabilities to ensure no downtime and the best player experience.

During the launch, our War Room service provided multiple layers of safety and redundancy – with a constant open ‘bridge’ call whilst the game went live. During this time, our team of Wizards were monitoring graphs, responding to alerts and helping to make sure that the infrastructure stayed online and operational during release.

What was the Outcome?

With most of the Makea team stretched between attending Gamescom and actually shipping the game, their CTO was in charge of the entire launch. Having Multiplayer Wizards deployed on the launch day War Room provided Makea with the ability to react fast.

Toikka described launching Supermoves as, “Trying to build a railroad while you’re already in the train – production timeline, runs on various hardware, localisation, marketing etc. At launch you are confronted by every mistake you make along the way.”

Delegating the launch to us kept everything (relatively) risk- and stress-free. Anything can happen during a launch – a big streamer comes online, a server goes down… anything! – and our War Room team was ready to react.

“Everything is so precarious. There are so many variables, and you need to keep everything in check; balanced. Without Multiplayer Wizards, it would have been nerve-wracking!” Toikka said.

The final result of our War Room was the Supermoves launch went without a hitch – seamless scaling, zero downtime, no breaks, and positive player reviews. Over 50K players, 86% on Steam, and the speedrunning community love it.

The final result of working with Multiplayer Wizards was Tomi Toikka’s glowing review – “It’s terrifying to release a new video game. Literally depending on one person to do this. Everything is incredibly hard and you made it very easy for us.” He said, before adding a message to any future customers…

“Indies – this [working with Multiplayer Wizards] is insurance. Preparation for an actual market situation that you’ve never been in before. That’s why it’s essential to lean on people that have been there before. Their War Room is a very good idea for any kind of multiplayer game. So many things you need to know it’s like a spellbook; and you need to know the right Wizards!”