You may have seen the recent news about Apex Legends – the multi-player battle arena game from Respawn Entertainment migrated to Amazon GameLift Servers, completing the cutover in only 10 days with zero player-facing downtime.
The migration was the work of Code Wizards group, the incredible games tech company, with offices in Reading, England, Cantebury, New Zealand and… Elgin in Morayshire (where they are proud sponsors of the UK’s most northerly game jam).
Code Wizards is a passionate games company, which doesn’t make games. Founders Stuart Muckley and Martin Thomas formed Code Wizards back in 2002, bringing together a combined 50 years of coding and video games experience with one goal: to make your games more awesome.
Since then, they have assembled teams of battle-hardened veterans across both Code Wizards and Multiplayer Wizards – professional services to help esports organisations, AAA studios, and indie developers build and run successful games.
The secret behind their success? According to Stuart and Tom Penrose, the Chief Online Services Officer, it’s because they: “care about your game and its players as much as you do.”
The Scottish Games Network sat down with Stuart and Tom to find out more about the company, it’s work with Apex Legends and their presence in one of Scotland’s most unlikely games clusters.
SCOTTISH GAMES NETWORK: Could you give us an introduction to Code Wizards? What’s the core mission, and what kind of studios or companies do you typically partner with?
STUART MUCKLEY: Our business is based around a single mission statement: “We make games more awesome” and our manifesto which leads with “Don’t be a Dick”. We help games companies make better games by supporting them around backends, online player engines, data analytics, scaling and running their studio.
TOM PENROSE: Our aim is to be their player two – we handle the noise so they can put in the best performance possible. As a business we love the fact that we still love working with studios and helping them bring their piece of art to players.
SGN: Your services span gametech, migration, integration, and consultancy like M.A.G.I.C.. Can you elaborate on the key problems you solve for game developers and publishers?
STUART: A key part of how we help is around bringing specialists into the game at exactly the right time. Our teams have worked together multiple times and know each others’ strength and weaknesses so they’re ready made and ready to run alongside each studio.
MAGIC Methodology helps studios create a play book on how to develop backend and scaling elements of their game so they are efficient both in enabling the game team to build the best game but also to let the game team integrate tech at a point that works for them.
We also bring a lot of cross-pollination into the development cycle – we’re lucky enough to work across hundreds of games and bring that experience to bear on everything we do. Often, we find there’s a simpler, quicker, and less risky solution we can suggest to teams which are non-obvious unless you do these things a lot.
TOM: One of the key aspects of what we do is operating across the whole lifecycle of a game, be that early consultancy with a newly-formed game team, right through to a game launch and ongoing support with our Multiplayer Wizards team
SGN: You work with major platforms like AWS and technologies like Azure PlayFab and Heroic Labs. How important are these partnerships to the services you offer?
STUART: Partnerships are a keystone of what we do and are where we help games teams a lot. When we started, it was almost essential to bespoke and build game tech because off-the-shelf just wouldn’t hit the needs of each game. These days, it’s around finding the right toolkit for the right game and then customising it to what’s required. Games are still unique, but the core foundation is now, almost always, around to work upon.
These partnerships aren’t like “typical” non-games arrangements, though; we never accept any commissions or “kickbacks”, and we work hard to ensure that the partners gain from working with us.
With AWS this allows us to have direct access to their development and support teams for GameLift Servers and GameLift Streams teams. This may seem trivial, but it makes us unique and allows us to feedback directly into the tech teams while giving game studios the best possible support, as we can work directly with the tech leads. And we have a very similar setup with Microsoft and PlayFab teams.
TOM: Typically, we see problems in live service games fixed much quicker than average due to our tight-knit relationships with the service teams
STUART: Our Heroic Labs relationship is second to none. Early on we identified it was great tech from amazing people so we arranged a partnership that works for everybody; for Heroic Labs it means that we handle their service delivery and this frees them up to concentrate on making amazing game tech, and in return we feed directly into their roadmap based upon what game studios tell us they need. In short: it’s a win-win.
And why does this matter to game studios? Well, it’s all about specialisms. Our engineers and architects know the various tech that’s out there and have used it on live games. We know that games engineers are super bright people, but they’re always time-constrained. Our job is to turbo boost their capability by taking on the things that we are amazing at, thus letting them be the best they can possibly be.
SGN: You were involved in the recent high-profile migration of Apex Legends’ servers to AWS. Could you share some insights into the scale and complexity of that project from your perspective?
STUART: Planning and launching a new game is tricky. This needed us to move a game, with a massive userbase and low tolerance to network changes, without being player impacting. When we started we knew this was the biggest game infrastructure migration of the decade (and maybe more).
The team planned really hard. We created test rigs and proof-of-concepts to illustrate each part of the game running on AWS’s GameLift Servers infrastructure while designing completely new tech to allow the Respawn game developers to be able to continue developing and able to debug and optimise the game without slowing them down.
TOM: Most importantly we designed a system which allowed us to move players in a really granular way. This was a key factor in such a small launch, as we could turn on a very small amount of traffic to the new system in just one location, monitor and revert really quickly if we were not seeing the numbers we wanted to see!
SGN: What were the primary technical challenges faced during the Apex Legends migration, and how did the Code Wizards team approach overcoming them to ensure minimal disruption for players?
STUART: We knew, from day one, that neither Code Wizards or Respawn wanted a single second of downtime or friction for players; that became our primary mission statement.
This led to an architecture that allowed a few attributes that were essential: zero downtime, reliability, performance enhancement, scalability, and the ability to rollback if an issue was discovered.
TOM: One of the key components of this architecture was observability – having a really rich dataset of metrics allowed us to measure before and after the migration happened and know really quickly if we spotted any errors. This gave us great confidence moving at pace.
SGN: What benefits has the migration brought to the game’s infrastructure and performance, and what does a project like this signify about Code Wizards’ capabilities?
STUART: Internally it’s been a massive morale and confidence boost; we knew we could do this kind of massive project but now we have proof. It’s been amazing to see the impact of engineers who are proud of what we achieved.
TOM: They cared very deeply during this project about the success of the game, and it really shows in the results. For the Apex Legends players, we’ve improved their gaming experience, reducing packet loss and latency so the game feels and plays smoother.
STUART: For developers the experience is now massively improved too as we’ve added the capability for developers to hop into servers and profile the server as it runs.
TOM: And we’re already starting to see some of these benefits in how quickly developers can examine and fix real-life issues with the added stats and metrics we were able to export.
SGN: Code Wizards has a base in Elgin, Morayshire, alongside Reading, Vancouver and Christchurch NZ. What attracted Code Wizards to establish a presence in Moray, and what makes it a good location for a tech company like yours?
STUART: It may sound trite but being good people is central to who we are. Part of that is that each studio should “feel” right. Our HQ is based not far outside of London, it feels “Southern” and relatively urban. As we expanded, we wanted another location that would be a contrast. Having worked with amazing studios like Hunted Cow Studios we knew Elgin was an amazing town and had engineers in the area that were super clever and super engaged. Moray allows us to have a studio that feels authentically Scottish and has its own identity. Location-wise it’s a short hop from Inverness and Aberdeen with good public transport links. Most importantly it’s semi-rural and has some of the most stunningly beautiful landscapes in the UK.
Our history has shown us that “Happy people make better games” and adding Moray allowed staff to join us in either the city location (i.e Reading) or more rural (i.e. Elgin) giving our engineers more choice to live and work in a location that allows them to thrive.
SGN: We’ve seen Code Wizards supporting local initiatives like the Moray Game Jam. How important is engaging with the local tech and games community in Scotland to the company, and why do you plan to remain committed to the Elgin area?
STUART: A big part of what we do is based around “pay it forwards” and we take “don’t be a dick” to be more than just not being evil but also to give back.
Moray Game Jam, school and university visits, help for charities are all central to who we are and why we are in games. We see forming a studio as “putting down roots” and that means you aren’t just a building with people in it; instead, you need to be proactively a part of that community and making it a better place.
SGN: From your perspective in Elgin and Reading, how do you view the current health and potential of the wider games development ecosystem across Scotland and the UK?
SM: It’s been tough. Super tough. Meeting with friends and other studios who are experiencing pain has been one of the hardest things of the last decade. But I truly believe we are in the best, most inventive, hardest working games ecosystem in the world. We’re blessed that so many games companies collaborate with us and others and that’s why the games output of the UK is so amazing.
SGN: Looking ahead, what are the key strategic priorities for Code Wizards? Are there new service areas or technologies you are particularly focused on exploring (perhaps related to the ‘Multiplayer Wizards’ brand)?
STUART: We’re continuing to push our mission of making games more awesome. As the data analytics side of the business has evolved then so have we; this year Code Wizards Group has added Databricks to our list of partners so that we can bring their tech to the games sector.
TOM: For Multiplayer Wizards we’re expanding the types of games we can support, and we’ve added a “Watchtower” level capability so we can support smaller studios and help them run their game, too.
STUART: We’re also helping games studios run their machines and aid their security through our new Studio Wizards brand, so developers don’t have to run their own IT and guess about how best to ensure their network and machines are secure and compliant.
SGN: What do you see as the most significant technical or operational challenges facing game developers today (e.g., scaling, live ops, new tech integration), and how is Code Wizards positioned to help address them?
STUART: Over the last 10 years we still see the same main challenge for developers: they’re time poor and need to concentrate on making the best possible game. Our job is to help them build the best game by taking the heavy lift in other areas (and avoid hiring and firing staff to do a very specific time-bound piece of work – nobody likes doing that)
SGN: Finally, what advice would you give to smaller studios or individuals in Scotland looking to navigate the complexities of backend infrastructure, live services, and scaling their games effectively?
STUART: My biggest frustration is that games studios often start working on these elements too late. Regardless of who you work with please ensure that you get LiveOps, externalised config and data pipes integrated into your game early (retrofitting is super painful!). For scaling and support, you need to ensure you understand what you need to run and only use dedicated servers if you need to do so (and then make sure it’s financially viable!).
Thanks to Stuart and Tom for their time and to Comms supremo Matt Simpkin for organising the interview. For more information visit the Code Wizards website, or find them on LinkedIn.