Amazon GameDev Blog

The Amazon GameDev team is excited to showcase Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift at this year’s GDC. We’ve been hearing positive and helpful feedback since our launch last month and will be discussing new features and improvements based on that feedback. Our booth is located in the Main Hall #1224, and we are eager to meet and talk to you.

We are also hosting a Lumberyard Track for Developer Day on Tuesday, March 15, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm, Room 2000 in the West Hall. Below is the full schedule and descriptions of our sessions. We designed these sessions to help game developers of all levels learn about our tools and services. We hope to see you there!

GDC DEVELOPER DAY SCHEDULE:

10:00 am – 11:00 am

Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift – Building Blocks to Create Great Games and Build Communities

Eric Schenk, General Manager, Lumberyard

Chris Dury, Director, Amazon Web Services

This session introduces the tools and services that will help you build on the shoulders of Amazon commerce, AWS, and Twitch, and make and deliver experiences that garner vibrant communities of passionate fans. We will provide an insider view into game technologies we’re building at Amazon, show examples of game innovations with Twitch and AWS, and introduce the features of Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift. Beginner/Intermediate

Eric Schenk has developed game technology and led game technology teams for the last 20 years. He is responsible for building client and server technology that enables game developers to build great games and content that leverage cloud services. Chris Dury is responsible for building and growing cloud services for game developers, including Amazon GameLift.

11:20 am – 12:20 pm

HDR Rendering in Lumberyard

Hao Chen, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Lumberyard

Take an in-depth look at the HDR rendering pipeline of Amazon Lumberyard. This session will provide an overview about Lumberyard’s rendering pipeline and emerging HDR standards. It will also deep dive into an HDR demo, highlighting content production, lighting, material and post processing techniques that work together to deliver spectacular visuals on the next generation HDR TVs. Beginner/Intermediate.

Hao Chen has led graphics R&D and game engine development for nearly 20 years at a number of game companies, including Bungie, Microsoft, and SingleTrac.

12:20 pm – 1:20 pm (Lunch Provided)

Scale Session-based Multiplayer Games with Amazon GameLift

Chris Byskal, Sr. Software Development Manager, Amazon GameLift

Geoff Pare, Principal Engineer, Amazon Web Services

In this session, Amazon engineers will introduce Amazon GameLift core concepts, complete a step-by-step walkthrough of deploying a multiplayer game to the cloud, and demonstrate rapidly scaling a game based on player demand. Intermediate/Advanced.

Chris Byskal has software development experience spanning the video game and distributed computing fields. His specialties include character animation, gameplay, game engine tooling and high-availability, fault tolerant, distributed systems. Geoff Pare has spent the last 10 years at Amazon building and operating distributed systems. Geoff specializes in infrastructure management at scale, and Amazon GameLift combines his love of gaming with cloud computing. 

1:20 pm – 2:20 pm

Built for Broadcasting

The coming era of game design for interactive live video communities

Brooke Van Dusen, Director of Game Developer Success, Twitch

While it’s tough to argue the influence game broadcasters have had on the success of many of today’s new releases, how does one create a game that’s worth broadcasting? More generally, what does it actually mean to build a game for a live video and chat community?  This session will look at the live video ecosystem, exploring the different ways broadcasters have integrated game systems as a part of their everyday communities and how developers are taking cues from these implementations to design new and unique games for video platforms. Beginner/Intermediate.

Brooke Van Dusen is Twitch’s Director of Game Developer Success, where he works with game studios interested in leveraging the Twitch platform as a central part of their growth and engagement strategies. 

2:40 pm – 3:40 pm

Game Architecture and Component Systems in Lumberyard

Bill Merrill, Sr. Engineer, Lumberyard

Rosen Baklov, Principal Engineer, Lumberyard

As the complexity of building games increases, game developers look to their technology to simplify complex problems and maximize productivity. To provide a solid foundation for the future, we have evolved our approach to engine modules, game systems, and game object components and entities. This talk provides an overview of how we have combined hierarchical data management, modern workflows, advanced asset management, messaging and reflection to enable developers to easily extend and customize Lumberyard. Intermediate/Advanced.

Bill Merrill has been a professional software engineer for the game industry building experience in nearly all areas of game development and technology including pipelines, tools, gameplay systems, physics, networking, optimization, and especially AI and animation. Rosen Baklov is a principle engineer at Amazon. Rosen is the architect of many large systems shared across  game teams, and he’s especially excited to advance Lumberyard’s core systems, pipeline, networking and physics.

4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Building Cloud-Connected Games using Lumberyard’s Cloud Canvas

James Clarendon, Sr.  Software Development Manager, Lumberyard

It’s no longer enough to build a game that has cutting-edge graphics or Hollywood production values.  Customers are looking for games that allow them to connect with friends and community, but game developers are often at a loss as to how to get started building features to fulfill that need. Amazon Lumberyard’s Cloud Canvas empowers developers to leverage services such as databases, data storage, and methods to execute game logic within Amazon Web Services (AWS) without needing to configure or maintain servers.  Cloud Canvas makes these resources accessible to non-engineers and helps content creators incorporate cloud-connected features directly into their game via the Lumberyard visual scripting system. We will provide an overview of the features of Cloud Canvas, including cloud resource management, the designer interface, and a deep dive on how to build your own unique cloud-connected features. Intermediate/Advanced.

James Clarendon has worked as an engineer, designer, and creative lead on titles such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and Deus Ex: Invisible War. He aspires to bridge the gap between design and engineering to enable easy access to the cloud for game designers.

For more information on our Developer Day, please visit the GDC 2016 Conference page.

As J.C. mentioned in his Lumberyard Blog post last week, we have been enthusiastically reading your feedback. One of the top requests we’ve heard is for a smaller, more manageable download. Today we are releasing an updated and more compact Lumberyard release. You can download it here. We have trimmed away some fat, and removed a couple of things that are only needed in rare circumstances. The result is a new, more compact release weighing in at 5.7 GB. The full release is still available on our previous version’s download page here. If you want to rebuild our code generation tool, AzCodeGenerator, you will need the full release, which includes a modified version of the Clang. In future releases we will make it possible to get the code and binaries needed to rebuild AZCodeGenerator independently. In the meantime, those of you who have been having trouble fetching the original release may find the new package easier to download. If you are one of those customers who could not get Lumberyard, please try this and let us know how it works for you. We are also working on a more robust solution with a small initial download. In the meantime, we wanted to get something into your hands as quickly as possible.

As always, there is more to come. Please keep the feedback coming! We are listening.

Our entire Lumberyard team has been enthusiastically reading your feedback since our Beta launch. One of the most frequent questions is “what’s coming up next for Lumberyard?”

Our philosophy on building a roadmap is simple – start by listening to customers, and work backwards from there. For example, when we heard from game teams (from indies to big studios) how complex, time consuming, and frustrating it is to deploy and scale multiplayer games in the cloud, we put Amazon GameLift into production. Late last year, one of our tech artists visited a studio participating in the closed beta program to hear firsthand what they wanted from the Lumberyard Maya exporter. Based on that visit we made changes to the exporter UI and functionality when we saw how the studio’s character artists worked. Amazon Game Studios, which has multiple games being built on Lumberyard, has also been working with the Lumberyard team in identifying new tools and features. For example, the visual effects artists at Double Helix had a vision for complex environmental particle effects in their game world, which led us to kick off the creation of the brand new Lumberyard particle effects tool that you see in our first Beta release.

But we’re just getting started with Lumberyard, and there’s much more on the way. We expect to adapt our roadmap quickly to the feedback we’re getting now that Lumberyard is in your hands.  Every day,  our teams are making updates and tweaks to their development priorities based on your feedback – so keep it coming.

While our long-term roadmap is mutable based on your feedback, I can give you a preview of some things we have coming the near future:

• Mobile Support – Mobile is an ongoing commitment of ours.  You will initially see Lumberyard support for high-end iOS and Android devices, including Metal rendering support, GridMate support, and mobile input support (e.g. multitouch, gyroscope, etc.).
• VR Support – Lumberyard VR support is coming soon, and will initially support Rift SDK 1.0, and OpenVR for developers building games for the HTC Vive.
• Component Entity System – The goal of the new Lumberyard Component Entity System is to provide building blocks for designers and artists to easily populate and define the behaviors of the game world, while also improving the modularity of the engine runtime. In the upcoming version of the Component Entity System, you will be able to create entities and assign components using drag-and drop-workflows in the Lumberyard Editor. The Component Entity update also includes support for C++ and scripting workflows (for both Lua and Flow Graph), a component library, a cascading prefab system (i.e. prefabs within prefabs), and support for reflection and serialization.
• FBX Importer – We are soon releasing a new FBX importer, built entirely from scratch, to make it easier for artists to bring content into Lumberyard (including customers who are fans of tools like Blender). Our next release will support single meshes and materials, and we’ll follow up with support for multi-mesh, skins, skeletons, and animations. Additionally, since we know that many game teams rely on their own proprietary formats, we’ve also built an abstraction layer alongside the FBX importer that enables you to extend the input format to suit your own team’s needs.
• Particle Editor – Some of the new additions you’ll see to the particle editor include support for GPU particles, LODs, and the ability for artists to load and work with multiple particle effects libraries.
• Twitch ChatPlay – Thanks to some recent clever requests from game designers, we are adding new Twitch ChatPlay options to support polls, surveys, and voting for your spectators.
• Amazon GameLift – Amazon GameLift will soon arrive in EU (Ireland) and AP (Tokyo) regions, so you can reduce latency for your players around the world.

This list is only a subset of work under way. In addition to the things above, we continue to make improvements to Lumberyard workflows, Cloud Canvas, the asset processor, the UI editor, and more. We’ve also heard your suggestions on improving the Lumberyard installation experience, and will be working towards reducing the download size and making Lumberyard simpler and faster to set up. And of course, we have saved some room on our schedules for surprises.

My twenty years of experience in the game industry has taught me to respect that every game developer has strong views about the technology that is the most critical to create their vision. I’ve been fortunate enough to work on an incredible diversity of genres and franchises during that time. When I worked on Total Annihilation, the engineers on our team aspired to optimize the engine to get hundreds of units on screen (beware my Flash rush…). Data-driven and realistic animation systems that didn’t drop frames was the focus of one of the Assassin’s Creed games I worked on. Procedural weapons and equipment made The Lord of the Rings games I worked on incredibly replayable, and it was dynamic in-game stores that helped make Deer Hunter on iOS and Android successful. We’ve assembled a team of industry veterans on Lumberyard that all have their own experiences building and using great technology to make great games. We’re excited to put that expertise to use on Lumberyard, building technology that can help you spend more time creating differentiated gameplay and building communities of fans, and less time on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building game engine components.

If you’re making plans for GDC, be sure to find some time to visit our booth and our developer day, where you’ll get a chance to meet some of our team, see new features in development, and learn more about our roadmap. We’ll talk more about GDC here on our blog in the near future. If you’re not planning on attending GDC this year, I look forward to seeing you on our forums.

Hi, my name is Eric Schenk, General Manager for Amazon Lumberyard, and I’d like to welcome you to the Amazon GameDev Blog.

We have been hard at work developing new technology to solve problems for game developer customers. Today, we introduce Amazon Lumberyard, a free AAA game engine deeply integrated with AWS and Twitch – with full source. To kick off the launch of  Amazon Lumberyard and Amazon GameLift, our friend Jeff Barr gives an in-depth overview of some of the components and interconnected features of the Lumberyard beta and GameLift on the AWS Official Blog.

I’ve been doing software development for over 35 years now, and I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in some pretty cool things. Early on, I worked on the theoretical underpinnings of distributed computing, and contributed to the development of the Linux kernel. I eventually got drawn into game development, because I saw that games had some of the hardest and most interesting problems in computer science. I then went to work at Radical Entertainment in Vancouver, BC and spent 15 years with Electronic Arts, where I worked with some amazing people to build technology that went into great franchises and games like FIFA, Battlefield, Madden, Need for Speed, and Dragon Age.

Great technology can indeed make things easier, but the complexity of games has grown faster than the ability of technology to simplify the work. At Amazon, we believe it should be possible to make great tools and technology that can simplify development for everyone. And beyond just making game development easier, our hope is to prepare developers for the future of games. We are witnessing the rise of gaming as the most pervasive form of entertainment in the world, the availability of mass communication binding people together in global communities via services like Twitch, and the massive increase in the availability of both personal computing devices and public cloud infrastructure. At Amazon, we believe these trends point to an exciting future where billions of customers view, play, and share experiences that were previously impossible to create.

Amazon Lumberyard is our first step on this road.  Starting with proven game and cloud technologies, we have created something new for customers, a game technology that is interwoven with AWS cloud infrastructure and Twitch.

We are just getting started. We have more to come, and I for one am incredibly excited to see where this road takes us, as we strive to create the tools and technology that make it possible for customers (game developers, players, broadcasters, viewers, and more) to bring previously impossible experiences to life.

That’s all I have today. I’ll be back, and so will many others from our team who will have exciting things to share with you in the coming weeks, months, and years. I hope you will join us on a journey to create the future of game development.