In our series “Games to match” we are looking into the games our customers have built, their journey, and their solutions to technical challenges.
Intro
Starting as a solo-developer project, Project Sparrow struck success straight after its initial release: Within the first days of Early Access, Sparrow rose from nothing to more than 500 concurrent users. How does that happen? A fresh and sticky idea: The game is an arena-based PvP game centred on archery combat. Archery makes for a refreshing alternative to the typical melee and gun-based combat seen in many PvP titles – and it clearly stuck.
However, becoming an overnight success brought challenges of its own. Players experienced slow matchmaking; lengthy server boot times were commonplace. All the common traits of growing pains. They detracted from the overall gameplay experience, loved by players, they had so meticulously crafted.
Regroup, build a team of teams, strike again
All this was March of 2022. Lots has happened since. In a daring move, the development team had made the decision to rework the game from the ground up, just six months after its initial release. They assembled a team of partners to set the relaunch up for success: Hathora for scalable server infrastructure, SnapNet for state-of-the-art netcode, and Idem to solve matchmaking once and for all.
Fast forward 2 years, Project Sparrow is now just months away from its relaunch and they are as prepared as they can be. By bringing Hathora and Idem together, Project Sparrow is leveraging the expertise of partners who have a history of successful collaboration on several games, dating back to their joint work on Stormgate. Today, Hathora and Idem offer a seamless, out-of-the-box integration for users of both services [Blog: Hathora-Idem integration]. Hathora's server orchestration ensures that servers are available within seconds, reducing wait times and improving the overall fluidity of the gameplay experience. With the implementation of Idem's matchmaker, Project Sparrow can significantly enhance their players' experience by dropping queue time and finding better matches. Once connected, Project Sparrow ensures competitive integrity by leveraging SnapNet's best-in-class solutions for client prediction, lag compensation, killcams, replays, and more.
From learning about Idem to the first successful playtest with live players coming from their core community, it only took Sparrow a mere two weeks to integrate Idem’s matchmaker into their project. This rapid integration allowed Sparrow to quickly unlock the full potential of Idem’s advanced features, transforming their matchmaking process and enhancing the overall gameplay experience.
Battling the matchmaking challenges
Project Sparrow is an interesting and tough challenge for matchmaking. They offer 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 game-modes, including the ability to bring your own parties. The gameplay is skill-focused, and any disparity in skill quickly becomes evident in the arena. Players hail from across the globe, but to ensure fast-paced gameplay, strict latency requirements mean players can only compete fairly when all players enjoy a low ping to the Hathora server.
What does this mean for a matchmaker? Well, it does not get much more challenging: The matchmaker needs to assess and trade off multiple dimensions of hard and soft constraints and identify optimal solutions in milliseconds. Matching 6 players of similar skill into balanced teams is a hard enough task that most matchmakers fail on. Adding the need to ensure ping compatibility across players makes it even more demanding, with countless potential combinations but only a few truly viable ones. To tackle this, a sophisticated blend of statistical methods, heuristics, and optimization techniques is essential.
Finding a solution to such a problem is a hard enough problem when you have a large player base. If you are a game just starting up (or worse, running a playtest), the challenge is even harder, but for the opposite reasons: With each constraint you have (geography, game mode, parties etc.) you limit the number of players that could potentially match each other. Add elements like day/night cycle, or weekend/weekday and you start getting to a point where you need to relax the skill criteria or else there is no possible valid match at all. Those criterias need to be tweaked constantly or else your ride on the knife's edge between too few and too many players will end badly. With a traditional matchmaker like OpenMatch this would be a nightmare, or more likely, impossible. Either the matchmaker stays too strict and finds no matches when activity is low, or it loosens skill requirements, leading to uneven matches even during peak times. Don’t even start thinking about what this does to your best players – they should prepare themselves for a long, long stay in the queue.
Idem’s matchmaker parametrizes itself automatically. When demand is low, it becomes more permissive to help players find matches, ensuring that even top players do not sit in the queue endlessly. During high demand, it tightens skill requirements to match close lobbies where top players will see eye-to-eye. All of this happens under the hood, so as a game-dev you can go worry about something else.
As Project Sparrow prepares for its relaunch, they are now fully equipped to handle not only the 500 concurrent users they hit during their initial launch, but easily 1 million without breaking a sweat, thanks to the robust infrastructure they put in place. With the matchmaker’s adaptive logic they ensure that as the player base expands, increased activity numbers are being used to raise game quality further, creating a more fun experience for players that will lead to higher player retention.
Take away
The takeaway? We were impressed by how boldly the team around Project Sparrow acted when they identified weaknesses in their game. It made them quick and cost effective at growing from a home-project to a competitive product. They identified where their core scope is and focused relentlessly on it: The great playing dynamic and the community around the game are a clear testament to that. Finding the right partners to take care of anything else a great multiplayer game needs made them create something incredibly powerful and up to the technical state-of-the art, in the most effective way possible. Explore/Exploit done right.
Comments