Creating together: Unity and Google Cloud

At Unite Berlin, we announced an alliance with Google Cloud to make it easier for you to create connected games. Since then, we’ve been hard at work!  Now, together with Google Cloud, we want to give you an update on what we’ve been collaborating on in this blog post.

We knew from the start that in order to achieve everything we wanted to, we’d have to have a great working relationship.  In the last month since we announced our alliance, we’ve actually done quite a bit of collaboration. We spent some quality time with our Google friends by inviting them to Unity’s annual Hackweek as one of our special guests.  Check out the short video below, in which Mark Mandel, Google Developer Advocate, describes his Hackweek experience and the project we worked on.

It just so happens that Mark also runs Google’s official Google Cloud Platform Podcast, and we found an opportunity for him to do an episode with Brett Bibby, Unity’s VP of Engineering.  You can listen to the podcast to learn how Unity and Google Cloud plan to create together from an R&D perspective.

Most recently, we spent some time with our friends at their annual cloud event, Google Next.  Suhail Dutta, VP of Cloud Services, introduced Unity to the Google Cloud audience during the developer keynote on Day 3.

We were also on our show floor, next to Ludia Studios, creators of Jurassic World Alive, which is made with Unity and Google Cloud Platform.

Altogether, you can say we’ve hung out quite a bit with our Google friends in the last few weeks, and yes, we did do some actual product work throughout all of this.

While we have plenty of items on our roadmap, let’s focus on what’s actually shipping soon.  At Unite Berlin, we announced that we were collaborating with Google Cloud on an open source matchmaking project. That project now has an official name:  Open Match.

We’ll be releasing the first version of this project later this summer.  Because this is our first release, we’re focusing on the fundamentals. Here’s what you can expect:

• Team-based matchmaking, so you can create groups of players and match them with other groups of players.
• Game modes, for games with different match types, e.g. Free-for-All, Capture the Flag, or whatever your game supports
• Latency awareness, so you can group players by their relative networking performance
• Time in queue, so you can prioritize players that have been patiently waiting

A core tenet of this matchmaker project is that it’s flexible.  So while Open Match will make it easier to address common scenarios —- like the ones above —- you’ll also be able to implement custom logic. Furthermore, Open Match is being designed for scalability too, so that you can serve all your users at once with scalable infrastructure tech (e.g. Kubernetes).

We have a lot more planned, but we’d love to hear what you think. Comment below, or even better, discuss with us and others on the Unity forums.