Carter Morgan and Guillaume Laforge co-host this week’s episode about what it took to develop the Google I/O Adventure Game. Our guest Valentin Deleplace and Guillaume introduce us to the game designed to encourage interaction with I/O attendees at the virtual conference held this year.

Adventure takes the look of a 90s role-playing game. The online world facilitates the meeting of hundreds of conference attendees and presenters to mimic the in-person conference setting and facilitate meaningful conversations. With avatars, text chatting capabilities, and mini games, attendees’ experiences go beyond simply watching online technical presentations.

The development of Adventure Game required scalability to handle varying attendee numbers. It takes advantage of many GCP products, including Compute Engine and Cloud Run. Valentin describes why he and the team chose Cloud Run and how they used it to to stress test the game. He talks about challenges the team faced and how they overcame them to produce a smooth, enjoyable experience for conference-goers. Being a game that’s live for specific periods of time rather than indefinitely presented different challenges as well. Valentin explains that scaling down, for example, is treated differently for this type of game.

Adventure will be available at future conferences.

Valentin Deleplace

Valentin Deleplace is a developer advocate at Google. He’s also a senior cloud backend engineer, interested in performance and UX, and an enthusiast Gopher.

Cool things of the week

• New Cloud Functions min instances reduces serverless cold starts blog
• What’s the key to a more secure Cloud Function? It’s a secret! blog
• Shift security left with on-demand vulnerability scanning blog
• All you need to know about Cloud Storage blog

Interview

• Google I/O site
• Chrome Dev Summit site
• Join the Adventure at Google I/O video
• Google’s I/O Adventure was almost as good as being there article
• Set Snail site
• Compute Engine site
• Cloud Run site
• Using WebSockets docs
• App Engine site
• Agones site

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Carter is working VM End to End.

Guillaume is working on new features for Cloud Workflows and helping with the Serverless Expeditions videos.