Hitman: From a Box to the Cloud, with Azure (White Nights Conference St. Petersburg 2017) The official conference website — http://wnconf.com

1. From a Box to the Cloud, with Azure
Christian Corsano
Lead Online Programmer
@ccorsano

3. • Modernised gameplay
• New game engine (Glacier 2)
• Online, Contracts mode
• Story driven
• Less appealing to core fans
• Long development time

4. Hitman (2016)
• Keep the best parts
• Bring back more freedom of approach
• Develop & deliver it in a brand new way

5. Hitman as a Service
• Ever expanding, ever evolving
• Digital first
• Episodic
• Listen and react to the community
• Live content
• Paradigm shift for development

6. Episodic & live
• Locations released as episodes
• Designed for replayability
• Escalations
• Elusive targets
• Contract mode
• Base game is the prologue
• Each episode packaged as a DLC
• Developed in parallel
• Allows for small tweaks ...
• Eg. on YouTube: ”Paris Puddle Pile”

7. Backend
• Extensibility
• Server delivered missions
• Server delivered menus
• Server driven game modes
• Authoritative server
• Scoring
• Progression
• Contracts creation
• Supporting services
• Analytics, authorization, configuration,
administration

8. Azure

9. Why Azure
• Platform as a Service leader
• Extensive toolbox of services
• Choosing the right tool for the right job !
• Familiar toolset for game developers
• Visual Studio
• C#

10. Services overview
WebApps
˃ Shared services & web tools
CloudServices
˃ Game logic and stateful user sessions
Search
˃ UGC discoverability
Storage
˃ Blob, Key value storage & Queues
SQL
˃ Relational storage
StreamAnalytics
˃ Analytic processing
DocumentDB
˃ Object storage
AppInsights
˃ Service monitoring & diagnostics
DataFactory
˃ Analytic pipeline orchestration
HDInsight
˃ On-demand big data processing
EventHub
˃ Metric events pipeline
Redis Cache
˃ Managed Redis

11. Scalability
• Scalable by design
• Actor-based architecture (Orleans)
• Autoscaling
• Cloud Services
• App Service
• Scalable storage services
• Azure Storage
• Table, Queue, Blob
• CosmosDB
• Manual scaling, fully managed
• Redis, Azure SQL

12. Azure Service Fabric
• Same approach as Orleans
• Fully managed
• Actors running on a scalable cluster

13. Analytics

14. Analytics
• Vital system
• Business indicators
• Gameplay feedback
• Issues investigation
• Custom assembly of Azure services
• Web collector
• EventHub
• Stream Analytic jobs
• Data Factory
• HDInsights (Hadoop)

16. Conclusion

17. Looking back
• 15 months being live
• More than one client update per month
• Even more server updates
• Live content coming out every week
• Learnings
• Automation & process are key
• Operating on a live product
• We are keeping players engaged

18. Looking forward
• New update this month
• Working on more
• Hitman is now a platform

19. Q & A