We sat down with CEO Mohammad Agha and Lead Developer Tri Truong to gain insights into Magmic’s adoption of brainCloud as the primary backend of their games.

Part 1 discussed the decision-making process and benefits of moving to brainCloud.

In Part 2 we discuss the process of migrating their apps to brainCloud.

How did you approach migrating to brainCloud?

We started with an initial pilot of our Scattergories Blitz game.  

It took 2 to 3 months to integrate brainCloud into the game fully. Overall, the transition went smoothly, thanks to brainCloud’s well-documented APIs and responsive support team. 

One of the most essential services we leveraged was the Turn-by-Turn Async Multiplayer system, which was a perfect fit for our game. This feature enabled players to take their turns at their convenience, keeping the gameplay engaging and interactive. Additionally, brainCloud’s flexible backend architecture made it easy to integrate leaderboards, player data management, and matchmaking, ensuring a seamless experience for both new and existing players.

And after the pilot?

After the initial pilot, we began migrating our key titles to brainCloud, including Phase 10, Spite & Malice, Passport Rummy, and Idle Pet Paradise.

The migration process for our key titles proceeded relatively smoothly, with Phase 10 and Passport Rummy taking approximately 1 to 2 months to integrate with brainCloud fully.

For Spite & Malice, we leveraged brainCloud’s Replay Service (i.e. PlaybackStream API) to develop a robust multiplayer function, ensuring a seamless and engaging player experience. This enabled us to implement an asynchronous turn-based system, allowing players to replay past moves and strategize effectively.

In Idle Pet Paradise, we leveraged brainCloud’s Cloud Code to integrate a Web3 platform, enabling blockchain-based interactions such as NFT ownership and in-game asset management.

Did you encounter any hurdles during the migration, and how were they resolved?

During the integration process, one of the challenges we faced was querying large datasets in our game. Handling big data efficiently was initially difficult, as performance and response times became a concern. However, the brainCloud support team was incredibly helpful — they provided us with key insights, including best practices for using Custom Entities and how to optimize queries by adding indexes. With their guidance, we were able to implement a more efficient data structure, which allowed us to develop features related to big data without performance bottlenecks. Their support made a huge difference in overcoming this challenge and ensuring our game runs smoothly at scale.

Was there a specific capability that delivered above and beyond your expectations?

One capability of brainCloud that truly exceeded our expectations is its Real-Time Technology (RTT). It enables us to develop real-time games and instantly send messages to online players, resulting in a smooth and engaging experience. We successfully leveraged RTT in Spite and Malice and Scattergories Blitz to build turn-based gameplay with seamless player interactions.

Was the transition disruptive for your players?

Transitioning to brainCloud has been seamless for our players. When we migrated our backend, we ensured that player accounts, game progress, and in-game purchases remained intact, ensuring no disruption to their experience. brainCloud’s robust authentication and data management tools made the migration smooth, and players were able to continue playing without even noticing the backend change. The reliability of brainCloud also improved server stability, reducing downtime and ensuring a smoother gaming experience overall.

Has brainCloud enabled product improvements that benefit your players?

Absolutely! Moving to brainCloud has allowed us to introduce several new features that enhance the player experience. For example, we leveraged brainCloud’s Real-Time Technology (RTT) to enable faster matchmaking and instant in-game notifications. Additionally, its cloud-based leaderboard and analytics tools helped us fine-tune game balancing and personalize rewards for players. We also improved scalability, ensuring that the game runs smoothly even during peak hours or special events, without lag or connection issues. These improvements have led to increased engagement and a better overall experience for our players.

Has the usage-based pricing of brainCloud been good or bad for you?

Usage-based pricing resulted in significant overall cost savings. Magmic has a library of games in various stages in their life cycle, and usage-based pricing ensures that a game’s costs are proportional to the size of its active player community. 

Usage-based pricing also had an interesting side effect for Magmic: More optimized coding. 

Usage based pricing created an incentive for us to more intelligently make calls in batches so as to reduce the cost. It drove us also to write better server code, to optimize what code resided on the server vs. on the client. By optimizing our code in these areas, we have achieved even greater savings in usage. And the user experience improved too - it’s win:win!

[For more information on cost savings, see Part 1 of this case study.]

Has brainCloud affected your approach to building games?

Before integrating brainCloud, our development team was split into two separate groups — backend and frontend. This separation often led to communication challenges and slowed down feature development, as frontend developers had to wait for back-end engineers to build the necessary infrastructure before implementing new gameplay elements.

After adopting brainCloud, our workflow became much more efficient. Now, each Magmic developer can work seamlessly across both brainCloud and Unity, allowing us to implement new features without bottlenecks or dependencies on a dedicated backend team. This has significantly reduced development time and enabled faster iteration on ideas.

How has brainCloud impacted your team's overall efficiency?

brainCloud has significantly boosted our team’s productivity by streamlining backend development, allowing us to focus on what matters most: building great gameplay experiences. With its powerful backend-as-a-service capabilities, we can quickly implement new features without having to allocate extra resources to backend infrastructure. This has enabled our team to iterate more quickly, experiment with new ideas, and bring features to market faster.