MCIRO CASE STUDY

Owlchemy Labs

Owlchemy Labs, a first-party Google studio, developed and runs the popular VR multiplayer title "Dimensional Double Shift". We provided backend engineering and cloud architecture expertise to improve their GCP setup.

Observability

Online Services

Cloud

Observability

Online Services

Cloud

[01]

introduction

Dimensional Double Shift is an innovative cooperative multiplayer Unity VR game by Owlchemy Labs

Owlchemy Labs was founded in 2010 in Austin, Texas. They pivoted to VR development in 2016 with their breakthrough title "Job Simulator" and have since gone on to deliver the award-winning "Rick and Morty: Virtual Rick-ality" and "Vacation Simulator". Owlchemy Labs was acquired by Google in 2017 to advance VR content creation across various platforms.

work [02]
method

Co-development

Our engineers embedded themselves into the Owlchemy backend team, bringing backend and cloud architecture expertise. We contributed to providing a modern, robust and cloud-native reimplementation of the backend suitable for production scale, and built supporting administrative tooling.

Owlchemy Labs

work
includes
[03]

Software development lifecycle

We extended the existing DevOps and automation for the game to also include automation for the backend, previously deployed through a backend-as-a-service platform. In doing this, we improved maintainability, testability and flexibility.

Our primary goal was laying the foundations for a resilient, high capacity, production-ready SDLC and within this system reimplementing the existing backend functionality, empowering the Owlchemy team to more easily maintain and extend functionality.

Testing and deployment automation

Continuous integration and delivery

Cloud architecture and infrastructure implementation

With Owlchemy being a first-party Google studio, we focused our attention on the extensive Google Cloud Platform. We designed and implemented a complete GCP-based auto-scalable backend utilizing various services supported by networking, scheduling and storage, fully automated and orchestrated with Terraform for infrastructure-as-code.

Terraform

Google Cloud Platform

Networking, scheduling and storage

Observability

We provisioned a production-grade observability platform, leveraging robust open standards such as OpenAPI and OpenTelemetry, fully integrated into the back-end services, greatly accelerating the discovery and resolution of errors.

First-class OpenTelemetry and logging support

OpenAPI integration

Cloud Logging integration

Bespoke environment tooling

[-]

Bespoke tooling for environment setup and deployment

We developed a unified build and deployment workflow that could be used both by developers working locally as well as in Jenkins automation pipelines.

Adhering to Google's internal security policies, we supported Workload Identity Federation, architecting a robust OIDC-based authentication system to support the Terraform orchestration, marshalling tools like OpenSSL, Keycloak and Ngrok to provide a working automated deployment solution.

CONTINUOUS_INTEGRATION_AND_DELIVERY

AUTHENTICATION_SYSTEMS

UNIFIED_WORKFLOW_SETUP

Backend structure

[+]

Backend structure

For a C# shop such as Owlchemy, looking to unify their codebase, we delivered an ASP.NET reimplementation of the existing Javascript backend service functionality.

Addressing the needs of a small internal development team, we architected the three service concerns inside a modular monolith framework, preserving simplicity of delivery and operation, but with flexibility to adapt to microservice architecture if required in future.

TIME-GATED_GAME_EVENT_MANAGEMENT

MATCHMAKING_SYSTEMS

PLAYER_INFORMATION_AND_NEWS_DELIVERY

Administrative tools and testing

[+]

Administrative tools and testing

Hand in hand with the new backend, we reimplemented a bespoke web-based administrative tool, allowing the team full visibility and control over the backend and its data.

We also integrated an extensive test suite for back-end services that can be used locally as well as in fully-automated pipelines.

INTEGRATION_AND_UNIT_TEST_SUITE_SETUP

JENKINS_INTEGRATION

TEST_RESULT_REPORTING