“If we were building this without Klotho, it would’ve easily taken us twice as long"
Case Study: Amihan Entertainment
A dream team of experienced game devs
Amihan Entertainment’s dream team of experienced game developers have set their sights on disrupting the existing ecosystem of blockchain games by leveraging their unique industry experience to build a roguelike tower defense game. What sets them apart from their competitors? Amihan’s tech team is stacked with experienced devs from large studios, who want to do good with crypto by building on a foundationally excellent game. They plan on experimenting with what player value and developer value can be realized in the intersectional space of blockchain technology and game development.
As the CTO of this indie studio, Paul Loy thinks a lot about where his team spends their time learning critical technology and making key business decisions. He focuses on efficiency when it comes to their tech ecosystem, which is why they use Klotho to simplify the complexity of AWS cloud development. This allows Amihan developers to focus on making delightful experiences for their players.
the next great thing for our players."
The business logic differentiator
A big challenge for any seed-stage startup is balancing time and finances responsibly. Amihan believes that their key differentiating factor exists in their game logic, and how they plan to create a fun, engaging game with a supportive economy and community. To them, this means buying tools when possible so that the talented team doesn’t waste their time wrangling AWS APIs, crafting specs, and wiring it all together.
Klotho’s promise is that by absorbing complexity, Amihan can focus solely on key business logic. Senior Software Engineer Charlie Roselius spoke about how with Klotho, instead of spending days or weeks onboarding Amihan onto AWS, he was able to jump right in. Without needing to develop extensive familiarity with the tooling, he’s been able to develop and run their live service game on AWS.
Leaning on Klotho’s simplicity, Amihan has been able to really focus on what they need to succeed as a game studio startup. Their lean team of focused devs is able to gain momentum quickly without constantly needing to context-switch back to technical tools, focusing on acceleration and hiring–not fighting through the weeds of configs.
A bot for bots
Initially, Amihan planned to try out Klotho for friends and family playtests. They ended up using Klotho’s capabilities a lot earlier when their community came online. With a growing, excited fan base of players, Amihan needed a Discord bot and supporting backend in a short period of time to moderate the community and prevent bots and scammers.
Instead of spending time on all the foundational infrastructure requirements of a Cloud-deployed microservice architecture, they were able to get their bot built and active in record time.
“We created a bot to, well, eliminate bots.”
Although there are Discord bots available that do similar moderation, Amihan’s bot needed to be uniquely powerful. They wanted a service that could handle player application forms by integrating with moderators and granting roles to keep their community safe and spamless.
To write a bot-detecting Discord bot, an engineer would have to spend weeks figuring out local development setups, spinning up databases, and pulling together frameworks. As any backend engineer knows, “deployment” doesn’t just mean a box that a game runs on; it includes services like a gateway, accounts, IAM management, secret stores, network access, and more.
With Klotho, Loy and his team were able to get the Discord bot’s backend up and deployed within a week–including an edge, data persistence, secrets management and a non-trivial least-privilege topology. “I was able to do business logic and deployment in the time it would have taken me to implement just the topology of the deploy,” says Loy. And that’s not including the cost most companies end up paying in manual human errors as they onboard onto a new software and have to learn best practices by trial and error.
Custom game engineering without the time cost
About Amihan:
Amihan Entertainment is a progressive game studio aiming to redefine both what it means to be a developer and a player in today’s connected world. Our vision is to equalize opportunity for all through games. We champion diversity because empathy empowers us to best serve the next gamer generation. If uplifting and enriching the lives of others calls to you, our party eagerly awaits its next adventurer.