GAM305: Automating Mother Nature: How Nexon Used AWS Services to Algorithmically Create and Manage an In-Game Ecosystem

Given the complexity and scale of contemporary games, it's been a dream of game creators to algorithmically generate game content. Nexon wanted to create a large-scale, open-world MMORPG called Durango, where algorithmic generation is desperately needed to minimize development costs and maintain game longevity. In-game objects such as trees and plants are placed based on complex rules, with the intention of mimicking the realistic ecosystem that evolves continuously. However, a large amount of computation and a careful orchestration of various computing resources are required due to the immense size of the in-game lands. Nexon achieved this goal by leveraging AWS services to take advantage of massive parallelism supported by the infrastructure. In this talk, Nexon discusses the architecture they settled on for algorithmic generation of game content in a large scale, and the AWS services involved such as Amazon SQS and Amazon ECS with automatic scaling and spot instances.