Powering Gray Zone Warfare to Early Success: MADFINGER Games and Heroic Labs

Earlier this year we shared a brief announcement as our team monitored the April 30th, Steam Early Access release of Gray Zone Warfare, a new, PC-exclusive title from MADFINGER Games. The game was a hit from the start, and we are excited to share more about the game’s development and how Heroic Labs and Nakama played a crucial role in its success.

Gray Zone Warfare, a tactical FPS game, marks a departure from MADFINGER Games’ usual focus on mobile games. Like any ambitious project, Gray Zone Warfare was a long time in the making - we first experienced the game’s early development at Gamescom in 2023, and were excited to see the game come to life. With the tireless work of MADFINGER’s 60+ person team, they were able to release the game on Steam Early Access less than a year later.

With the early excitement now settling into a more manageable baseline, we were able to catch up with Johanny Clerc-Renaud, Technical Director at MADFINGER Games, to learn more about the game’s development, pre-launch preparations, and plans for the future.

In Development

As the Technical Director at MADFINGER Games, Johanny is responsible for overseeing the development of Gray Zone Warfare. He brings over 10 years of industry experience to MADFINGER, including having worked at Bohemia Interactive and Ubisoft. The decision was made early on to use Unreal Engine 5 for the game’s development, but the team also realized early on that they would need a backend solution to properly support the game’s online multiplayer features. The legacy online services they had used before - hastily architected and developed in a hurry, carrying years worth of tech debt from multiple teams along with being expensive to run and maintain, were not up to the task.

Johanny and his team surveyed the market and evaluated several backend solutions, including Playfab and Epic Online Services. Nakama stood out from the crowd by virtue of being open-source, allowing the MADFINGER team to dive into the source code if needed, as well as the flexibility and extensibility provided by Nakama’s runtime framework. The team also appreciated the fact that Nakama was built by Heroic Labs, a company with a strong reputation in the industry.

“Nakama is really the perfect kind of backend - you can forget about it and it just works! Having access to the source code and being able to develop locally made it easy to get started, and the support we receive from the Heroic team really put it over the top.” - Johanny Clerc-Renaud, Technical Director at MADFINGER Games

After getting started with Nakama, the MADFINGER development team was able to quickly integrate the backend into their game and leverage the full suite of Nakama features: Storage Engine, Steam Authentication, the rich social features such as chat, groups, friends, and parties.

The powerful Multiplayer Engine and Matchmaker were also critical to ensure fast and effective matching of players into sessions, and for managing those game sessions across the fleet of headless servers.

Multiplayer and Matchmaking

A seamless player experience - ensuring players could quickly find a match and get into the game - was a top priority for the MADFINGER team. The Nakama Multiplayer Engine and Matchmaker were instrumental in achieving this goal. Working closely with Heroic engineers, the MADFINGER team developed custom functions to handle the game’s matchmaking requirements, such as ensuring players were matched based on their skill level and location, as well as the game session state management.

Authoritative multiplayer matches are managed by Nakama and bound to the game’s dedicated servers - this 1:1 matching ensures that players have a consistent experience and that the game’s servers are not overloaded, while also allowing for efficient use of resources and the game to be scaled horizontally only as needed.

Nakama communicates with the game servers for game state updates, placing all relevant details in a match label that can then be used for detailed matchmaking queries. This allows for a high degree of flexibility in how matches are created and managed, and ensures that players are matched quickly and effectively.

A queue of waiting players is maintained by Nakama in storage and in-memory search indexing system, and used as the first source of players when a new server is spun up, before being opened up to all other realtime players. This also provides stats to players on the status of the queue and their position, ensuring that players are kept informed and engaged while waiting for a match.

To further ensure fairness and an enjoyable player experience, support was added to allow players to dynamically rejoin their active match in case of short disconnects.

Pre-Launch

With the game’s development well underway, the MADFINGER team began preparing for the game’s Early Access launch on Steam. The team had a clear vision for the game’s launch, with a focus on building a strong community and ensuring that the game was well-received by players.

Development timelines are always tight, and this was no exception. With final load testing and bug fixing taking place right up to the weekend before launch, the team worked closely with Heroic Labs to ensure that the game’s backend was ready, and that the team was prepared to handle the influx of players.

In the lead up to the launch, Johanny and his team wanted to test the game’s backend under real-world conditions, and so they ran a series of load tests using as many dedicated servers as they were able to provision from their provider, upwards of 1,400 servers each with 48 players.

“We really felt the support from Heroic Labs at that critical time, load testing on Sunday night! Their help and insights were crucial in making sure we were launch-ready.” - Johanny Clerc-Renaud

The load tests were a success, with Nakama handling the load from 100k CCU and 44k transactions per second with sub-second latency and no issues. With some assistance from Heroic engineers, the MADFINGER team was able to identify and fix a bottleneck by using Nakama’s match labels for transient data as opposed to storage, further optimizing the game’s performance.

After that long weekend of testing, the MADFINGER team was confident that the game’s backend was ready for launch.

Launch

The hard work behind the scenes paid off when the game finally made its way into waiting players’ hands - Gray Zone Warfare launched on Steam Early Access on April 30th, 2024, with an excited audience propelling it to the top of the charts. The game quickly gained a following, with players praising the game’s graphics, gameplay, and online features. The game’s peak CCU reached over 72,000 players, with over 1 million downloads in the first week.

The Heroic team was on-hand and closely monitoring the game’s launch day performance as it unfolded and quickly climbed to the top ranks on Steam and Twitch.

More to Come

With the game’s successful launch behind them, the MADFINGER team is now focused on building out the game’s features and content, as well as preparing for the game’s full release. The team is also exploring the possibility of bringing the game to other platforms.

The team are planning for two major updates to the game each year going forward, along with a host of smaller-scale, quality-of-life updates and bug fixes. They are also planning to add new weapons and game modes to the game, as well as new social features and customization options, all tailored to achieve the best possible player experience.

Johanny and his team are excited about the future of Gray Zone Warfare (and we are too!) and this partnership with Heroic Labs. They are confident that Nakama will continue to support the game’s growth and success, and are looking forward to working with the Heroic team on future projects.