Supersolid with Kami May

11/06/19 • 36 min

This week, Mark and Jon bring us a fascinating interview with Kami May of Supersolid, a gaming company in London. With the help of Kami May, Supersolid recently launched their first multiplayer game, Snake Rivals. This session-based game puts players in an arena where they can choose from three modes: endless, gold rush, or battle royale.

To produce the game, Supersolid makes use of many GCP products. Snake Rivals is powered by Kubernetes and Agones, which Kami chose because it offers functionality that works well with gaming. It provides server allocation which allows players to continue play even during an update, has the ability to scale, allows labeling, allows for different gaming modes, and more. To reduce latency, Supersolid operates in nine regions. Supersolid uses BigQuery and continuously gathers data so they can make adjustments to make sure game play is efficient, fun, and functional. Kami explains that navigating the world of multiplayer gaming for the first time was tricky, but the Google support team has been very helpful!

Kami May

Kami May is a Senior Server Developer at London-based mobile games studio, Supersolid. Her lifetime passion for video games drove her to join the games industry soon after graduating from university in 2016. Since then, Kami has worked on multiple titles for mobile, PC, and console. Most recently, she’s been bringing Supersolid’s most ambitious project to date - Snake Rivals - to life, powered by Agones on GCP. In her free time she can be found at the top of the ladder on Path of Exile, chasing the 6k MMR dream on Dota 2, or searching for London’s best fried chicken.

Cool things of the week

Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog
Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site
Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration blog

Interview

Supersolid site
Snake Rivals site
Agones site
Kuberentes site
Go site
Cloud Load Balancing site
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Supersolid Careers site
Snake Rivals on Google Play site
Snake Rivals on iTunes site

Question of the week

What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Human has been Nutralised” by cityrocker of Freesound.org
“Laser Automatic Heavy” by dpren of Freesound.org
“Gong Sabi” by Veiler of Freesound.org

Kami May

Cool things of the week

Keep Parquet and ORC from the data graveyard with new BigQuery features blog
Machine Learning: An Online Comic from Google AI site
Bring Your Own IP addresses: the secret to Bitly’s shortened cloud migration blog

Interview

Supersolid site
Snake Rivals site
Agones site
Kuberentes site
Go site
Cloud Load Balancing site
BigQuery site
Stackdriver site
Supersolid Careers site
Snake Rivals on Google Play site
Snake Rivals on iTunes site

Question of the week

What are best practices for setting up user accounts in Cloud IAM?

Where can you find us next?

Mark will be working on blogs and videos at home.

Jon will be at AnimeNYC, Kubecon in November and Google Kirkland for an internal hackweek.

Sound Effect Attribution

“Small Group Laugh 4, 5 & 6” by Tim.Kahn of Freesound.org
“Human has been Nutralised” by cityrocker of Freesound.org
“Laser Automatic Heavy” by dpren of Freesound.org
“Gong Sabi” by Veiler of Freesound.org

Previous Episode

FACEIT with Maria Laura Scuri

Happy Halloween! Today, Jon Foust and Brian Dorsey chat with Maria Laura Scuri of FACEIT about ways they are reducing toxicity in gaming. FACEIT is a competitive gaming platform that helps connect gamers and game competition and tournament organizers. In order to do this well, FACEIT has put a lot of energy into finding ways to keep the experience positive for everyone.

Because gaming toxicity can involve anything from verbal jabs to throwing a game, FACEIT uses a combination of data collecting programs and input from players to help identify toxic behavior. In identifying this behavior, FACEIT has to consider not only the literal words spoken or actions made, but the context around them. Is that player being rude to strangers or is he egging on a friend? The answer to this question could change the behavior from unacceptable to friendly banter. Using their own machine learning model, interactions are then given a score to determine how toxic the player was in that match.

The toxicity scores along with their program, Minerva, determine if any bans should be put on a player. FACEIT focuses on punishing player behavior, rather than the player themselves, in an effort to help players learn from the experience and change the way they interact with others in the future.

Maria’s advice to other companies looking to help reduce toxicity on their platforms is to know the context of the toxic event. Know how toxicity can express itself on your platform and find ways to deal with all of them. She also suggests tackling the issues of toxicity in small portions and celebrating the small wins! Her final piece of advice is to focus on criticizing the behavior of the user rather than attacking them personally.

Maria Laura Scuri

Maria is the Director of Business Intelligence at FACEIT, the leading competitive platform for online multiplayer games with over 15 million users. She joined FACEIT as part of the core team in 2013 as an intern assisting with everything from customer support to event management. Her passion for data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence saw her quickly rise through the ranks to her current position, leading the Business Intelligence and Data Science teams.

Maria works side by side with some of the biggest tech companies in the world including Google Cloud. She is the main lead on a number of projects including the inception of an Artificial Intelligence Admin to fight toxicity on the platform. Maria is responsible for implementing best practices around data visualization and tools that allow the FACEIT team to thrive, as well as sourcing and training new talent.

Maria is a huge video games fan. You can find her on League of Legends as “FACEIT Lulu” and on Steam as “Sephariel”.

Cool things of the week

What can Google Cloud do for you? New trainings for business professionals blog
Leave no database behind with Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog
How to orchestrate Cloud Dataprep jobs using Cloud Composer blog
Updates make Cloud AI platform faster and more flexible blog
Use GKE usage metering to combat over-provisioning blog

Interview

FACEIT site
FACEIT blog
FACEIT on Medium site
Steam site
Perspective API site
BigQuery site
Looker site
Cloud Datalab site
Jupyter Notebook site
Cloud AI Platform site
TensorFlow site
Google Cloud Data Labeling site
G...

Next Episode

Cloud Run GKE with Donna Malayeri

Jon and Aja host our guest Donna Malayeri this week to learn all about Cloud Run and Anthos! Designed to provide serverless containers, Cloud Run has two versions: fully managed and Cloud Run for Anthos.

Donna’s passion for serverless projects and containers shows as we discuss how these options benefit developers and customers. With containers, developers are able to go serverless without a lot of the typical restrictions, and because they are a standard format, containers are fairly easy to learn to use. Tools such as Ko can even do the work of generating docker containers for you. One of Cloud Run’s most unique features is that it allows developers to bring existing applications. You don’t have to rewrite your entire app to make it serverless! Developers can also reuse instances, making the process more efficient and cost effective.

Cloud Run for Anthos allows projects to stay on-prem while still enjoying the benefits of containers and the Cloud Run platform.

Later in the show, Donna tells us about Knative, which is the API Cloud Run is based on that helps create portability between Cloud Run versions, as well as portability to other vendors. We also get to hear the weirdest things she’s seen put in a container and run in Cloud Run!

Donna Malayeri

Donna Malayeri is a product manager for Cloud Run for Anthos. She’s worked in the serverless space since 2016 and is bullish on the future of serverless. Prior to joining Google, she was the first product manager at the Seattle startup, Pulumi. She was also a product manager on the Azure Functions team at Microsoft, guiding the developer experience from its beta through the first year of general availability. Donna is passionate about creating products that developers love and has worked on programming languages such as F# and Scala.

Cool things of the week

Bringing Google AutoML to 3.5 million data scientists on Kaggle blog
GCP Podcast has a website on dev site
Command and control now easier in BigQuery with scripting and stored procedures bog
Skaffold now GA blog

Interview