While we’ve been collaborating for years, the integration of Cyrex into the Magic Media team means you now find industry-leading technology, tools and teams all in one place, in one neat package! Two such tools are the incredible Swarm for load testing services and the Rune architecture for Unity game projects.
Let’s take a look at these two tools and how they can be used to help your game development pipeline.
Headless Load Testing with the endless Swarm technology
Swarm is a proprietary and impressive piece of software created by the incredible minds at Cyrex. Originally, their team were mostly focused on penetration testing and cybersecurity but load testing was always something in their wheelhouse. In time, load testing not only became more popular but it also became more necessary. Both as they began to deal with bigger clients and games grew dramatically in scale and scope for launches or content drops.
Swarm is a headless, cloud-based load testing tool that takes out the hardware requirements of large-scale load testing. Built using AWS, it has the capacity to simulate up to a million players concurrently. More importantly, Swarm is constructed so that each “player” is simulated entering and engaging with your intended player journey. Before the testing begins, our load testing team will work with you to develop a player journey of interactions from account creation, logging in, moving, interacting with quests and enemies, all without the hassle of needing actual hardware to run several instances of your client.
Whether you need spike testing to handle sudden surges at a peak, soak testing for those long engagements for MMOs or other long-form player activity, or peak testing to see where your system struggles for those established high-volume hours of user traffic, Swarm has you covered. Even if you just need a good, old fashioned stress test to see how long it takes your system to break, we can do it with Swarm. Out of the box compatible with every major communication protocol, this highly scalable and cost-per-use tool can be tailored to your exact specifications complete with a comprehensive report on your results and some best practice solutions if you need them.
Unity Framework that works like Magic: Rune
Next up, specifically on the game development side, the Magic Media team created Rune. A Unity engine framework, it was designed for the simple intention of making development faster and unified across any Unity project. At the end of the day, it is a collection of modules that are often found in any Unity project. There are some for mobile, some for console, some for PC, and plenty for cross-platform efforts. We have modules for common UI elements, modules to take care of analytics and data gathering, modules to handle crashes, modules for technical art, and modules to handle code architecture. In summary, we have an easier, faster, simpler time to upgrade and develop!
For example, when developing for iPhones. The newer versions of all that little notch near the camera. Every single game needs to take that notch into consideration when developing UI on those newer iPhones. Easy as that, our module handles it, ensuring it is spaced correctly and never overlapping. No mess, no fuss, no tweaking on your developer’s side.
The intent of our Rune framework is a unified and easily integrated set of modules that we can pick and choose – making the life of our developers much easier. For any Unity project across our company, developers and programmers can seamlessly switch between them and still have an easy time integrating thanks to the unified Rune framework. In the end, what we have are a selection of Unity projects that have a similar framework and comparable state. So, when we have teams expanding or changing, we see a minimal state of delay because the standards and technology are unified! One major benefit of this system is that we can start development and create prototypes lightning quick. We’re talking one hour sometimes for a quick prototype! In that stage, speed of that caliber is invaluable.
For quality, efficiency, and industry-leading tools, look no further than Magic Media. With the combined talents now at your disposal, your full-cycle game development, cybersecurity, load testing, game VFX, and many more services can all be found in one place, in an easily combined package! Get in touch today and let’s create magic.
