Tiny Digital Factory Turns to Beamable for GameSparks Migration and New Titles

Since 2015, Tiny Digital Factory (TDF) has been an independent developer and publisher specializing in the exciting world of mobile motorsports gaming. By 2017, the experienced team of over 30 game developers looked to Amazon GameSparks to provide critical backend game server infrastructure for free-to-play mobile titles. When TDF was told that GameSparks was going away, they had to rapidly find a new game backend partner. Read on to learn how they chose Beamable.

Challenge

In August of 2021, Amazon announced it was sunsetting GameSparks which sent Tiny Digital Factory on a search for a new game backend-as-a-service (BaaS) partner. The team at TDF was already considering making a backend game server move and the need to migrate off by September of 2022 was the motivation to rapidly and methodically search the market for a new solution for GT Manager and other new projects.  

Tiny Digital Factory faced three main challenges when evaluating backend game solutions:

1. Multiple programming languages – Most game server technologies require you to write your game client code in one language and your game server in another. In the case of TDF, their games are built in Unity using C# and they often have to switch to a cloud code script like Javascript in order to implement game server features. Writing Javascript is not difficult, but without specialized developers, it is hard to optimize. 
2. Performance – Due to the lack of specialization in multiple languages, managing game performance as the number of players increases is a challenge. You can write functional code in a scripting language like Javascript, but as the number of calls by active players increased, scalability became a real challenge. The new solution would need to scale much more predictably. 
3. Timeline – With GameSparks scheduled for sunset in less than 12 months, whatever solution was chosen for migration would need to be rapidly implemented. There had to be solid support and clear parity across critical game features. 

Solution

Tiny Digital Factory found out about Beamable from the GameSparks Migration documentation. There were a number of very clear examples of how Beamable features lined up with GameSparks features which made it easy to understand how the migration would take place. It was also important that whatever game backend TDF moved to next, it should have deep Unity integration and leverage C# as the primary cloud code language.

Beamable checked both boxes. 

Of particular value was Beamable’s C#Microservices with MicroStorage feature. Being able to write C# side-by-side on the client and server, have everything live in the same Github repository, and use the same systems for pull requests and developer workflow was judged very unique and desirable by the TDF team. 

Finally, Beamable’s PRO Support plan checked all the boxes to ensure that the Tiny Digital Factory team had everything they needed for their migration. 

“Every developer working with Beamable is in slack. The fact that we can get a simple answer most of the time and a deeper one in a few hours is really great.” 

Results

Tiny Digital Factory successfully migrated GT Manager within five months and has proceeded to build new projects on Beamable. 

“Working directly in Beamable, it has gone faster than expected. Building, deploying, testing is really fast!” 

One of the biggest surprises working with Beamable has been the speed of new developer onboarding. Since everything is in C#, Tiny Digital Factory can bring on a new Unity engineer, get them set up with their environment, and in one day that developer can create a C# Microservice, make material changes, and start checking in code that moves the game roadmap forward. 

“The onboarding is really, really fast for C# devs. For anyone that needs a backend with Unity, Beamable should be the first one they think about.”

To try Beamable for yourself, sign up for free and see what you can accomplish. Check out our sample projects and contact us with any questions. We are here to help you be as successful as Tiny Digital Factory!