Remāngu on the Benefits of Building a Game in the Cloud

Introduction

Štěpi: Štěpán Kaiser, Co-Pilot at Remāngu, boomer shooter lover and fan of cloud technologies. To give Jan – The Tech Wizard – the freedom to focus on platform development, he takes on the role of a renaissance man – making a bit of sales, marketing, operations, and HR. With great respect for the gaming industry, Stepan is passionate about fostering a safe environment for game developers to come together and create better games, which he can't wait to play.

Honza: Jan Sechovec, CTO of Remāngu, is passionate about helping game studios build better games faster. With a team of expert developers and innovators, Jan and his team have revolutionized cloud game development through the Remāngu platform, enabling faster development and secure remote work for game studios of all sizes. The team's energy is off the charts, leaving energy drinks in the dust.

The Story of Remāngu

It all started with our first customer needing a cloud game development environment – an animation studio 3Bohemians. They came to us and said they were trying to get a deal on a AAA game. Still, they are struggling to meet the security and compliance requirements of the AAA studio, and it is difficult for them to integrate their remote artists into the AAA studio's environment.

We built the game development environment from the ground up in AWS, and they got the deal. That's where it all started, and then we started to explore this area more and more; we delivered about 20-30 virtual game studio environments on a project basis, and then we decided to build our platform Remāngu. You can see the story of our first customer here:

The Team

The team behind Remāngu is relatively small and completely remote. We have a few people in Prague, Czech Republic, including Honza, as CTO and Product Lead, our development team, and our Customer Success Lead Jakub. Stepan is responsible for business operations and marketing and is based in Tallinn, Estonia. Fergus, who covers the US market, is based in San Francisco.

Remāngu is a spin-off of the company Revolgy – a leading European AWS and GCP partner. Revolgy is headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, and fully remote with people in several European countries.

Remāngu's Cloud Platform

Jan and I are active gamers, and we have in common that we admire the game industry for its diversity and for bringing together two very different worlds – art and technology. Before we decided to build Remāngu, we conducted hundreds of interviews with people about "remote game development," and we realized that there really is a space to help people create games more efficiently, we want to help with that and then play those games.

You know how game studios must worry about hardware, licenses, servers, security, compliance, moving large files, versioning, playtesting, and managing remote people? Well, Remāngu does everything for you – you just give each employee their computer in the cloud with unlimited power. You just make games.

Approach to Security

The entire platform is built on AWS, which meets the most demanding security and compliance requirements. AWS and Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) have jointly created a new partnership called the Trusted Partner Network (TPN). The TPN program seeks to raise security awareness, preparedness, and capabilities within the media and entertainment industry. AWS continues to monitor and contribute to TPN’s content security benchmarks.

On top of the shoulders of hyper-scaler, we follow a well-architected framework while designing all functional and security aspects of Remāngu. All customers’ tenants live in fully isolated environments.

Your Identities and Devices are secured under the roof of a centralized IAM and Device management platform. We partnered with Jumpcloud to provide a state-of-the-art security platform enabling customers to easily manage all aspects of their studio tenants. Moreover, we provide integrations with other directory services, such as Google Workspace Identities, Office 365, Azure directory services, and others, out of the box.

Storage Options and Specs

As for storage, we offer a fast and scalable Windows File Server with a maximum capacity per file server of 512 TB (you can have an unlimited amount of those). Our throughput capacity is 2048 MBps, and we can offer up to 80 000 IOPS.

Regarding HW specifications for our Workplaces, we are currently offering those types (with Windows or Linux OS):

• Animus XL – 16vCPU, 64GB Memory, 24GB GPU Memory, NVIDIA A10G
• Animus L – 8vCPU, 32GB Memory, 24GB GPU Memory, NVIDIA A10G
• Animus M – 4vCPU, 16GB Memory, 24GB GPU Memory, NVIDIA A10G
• Animus S – 8vCPU, 32GB Memory, NVIDIA T4 GPU
• Animus XS – 4vCPU, 16GB Memory, NVIDIA T4 GPU
• Animus for Code M or L – general purpose Turbo CPU

All Workplaces and Storage are available in 31 Geographical Regions around the world. In most places, we can easily get below 30 ms latency.

The Benefits of Cloud Gamedev

List of benefits:

• Fast onboarding – from sign-up to fully provisioned instance in less than 10 minutes.
• On-demand development environment with unlimited power – powered by leading cloud provider AWS.
• The secure development environment and easy identity management.
• Onboard remote talent easily – Empower your team to work remotely from anywhere worldwide and quickly get them up to speed with the best cloud technology available.
• Build a distributed development pipeline – Reduce the security risk of distributed hardware with a cloud build pipeline that allows you to test new technology.

The beauty of building the game in the cloud is its simplicity and quick setup:

• The first step is creating your Studio in the Cloud. Choosing the name of the studio, first admin, and home region. Then the studio is created automagically.
• You can invite your colleagues to your virtual team when you have your studio.
• Then you set up your Workplace(s) in the cloud with all tools and SW you are used to working with when making a game (Maya, Blender, UE5, Unity, proprietary engine, etc.). There are no limits.
• Then you can create fast team storage and migrate your existing assets if you want.
• You can also create a one-click deployment of Perforce (if you use it).
• All previous steps take 10-15 minutes, and you can start working. If you need any special integrations with your existing environment, we are ready to help you.

Future Plans

Our current roadmap is as follows:

• Publishing Remāngu on AWS Marketplace to make it easier for existing AWS Users to use our platform. 
• Git LFS as a SCM service. You can deploy Git servers and corresponding infrastructure and have them all under one roof.
• Unity3D builds
• iOS and Mac builds on dedicated Silicon M1 instance clusters
• Amazon GameLift fleets as a part of our CICD pipeline. Building, deploying, versioning, and release management for your dedicated game servers – fully automated.
• Streaming platform for testing the games right after the build – for all build targets. You don’t need to download and install the artifact. You just click and play.
• And much more.

Discover Remāngu with a 14-day free trial at https://app.remangu.gg/, and stay connected with our team on LinkedIn. As a special treat for 80.lv readers, use the code 80LV to enjoy a 50% discount for 6 months of using Remāngu. 

Štěpán Kaiser, Co-Pilot at Remāngu

Jan Sechovec, CTO at Remāngu

Interview conducted by Arti Burton