Video Game Network Analysis : A Study on Tooling Design

Abstract: Crackshell is an indie game studio situated in Stockholm. They released particular iterations of a game called Hammerwatch, which is developed with their in-house game engine and they are still working to extend both the Hammerwatch and the game engine. Hammerwatch is a rogue-like multiplayer game played by up to four players in a single session by using peer to-peer network topology. These days, Hammerwatch has gotten significantly popular and the planned features have led the team to question of whether their network utilization is performant and in what ways they can improve this utilization. Even though they the are ones who implemented the network part of Hammerwatch, they don’t exactly have an understanding of the underlying behavior of the utilization, nor they have any way to analyze it currently. This project is aimed to design and implement a proper tooling implementation for their data analysis needs by identifying the network topology, datastructures, extraction, storage and providing an environment that is easy to analyze the network utilization. In order to achieve this aim, an iterative approach through design thinking has been conducted with Crackshell. In this regard, there were certain decisions to be made in accordance with the constraints and the purpose of the tooling, which is defined with the help of Crackshell by the conducted workshops as a module of the design thinking approach. The above-mentioned strategy allowed a swift understanding of the problemthat led the tooling to be approved as both helpful and easy-to-use by Crackshell. The data analysis tool was implemented by using a local data extraction solution, MongoDB and Jupyter Notebook in Python together with extensions that helped further with the analysis of the collected data. The results of the data analysis deemed itself as a significant success, where problems such as the game events being sent unnecessarily frequently, stale data issues, caching opportunities, and potential data clustering issues in network packets were pointed out. Crackshell was happy with the provided ability to look at their network utilization in a detailed manner, which led them to use the implemented tooling for further analysis as Hammerwatch is kept developing.