Game and Backend Technology

Game Engine

Illuvium is built in Unreal Engine 5. The battles run in a simulation coded in pure C++ that executes the game instances in less than a few milliseconds. This is then hooked up to Unreal Engine, where it is visualised. The simulation is deterministic, which means that the server can store the input values which are very small, and any match can be replayed. Illuvium will be able to easily archive every battle ever played.

Cinematic Mode

A cinematic mode (shown in the gameplay trailer) allows people with less powerful computers to render out the matches in extremely high quality. This is only achievable because of the deterministic nature of the underlying simulation.

The Overworld

Each region in Illuvium is meticulously crafted by some of the best digital artists in the world. Proprietary technology is used to achieve a cinematic feel to the assets, due to the workflow that relies heavily on an extremely powerful render farm which enables the game to preprocess much of the computational data so that the graphics load in game is lower, while still looking rich and detailed.

Backend

Our backend is hosted on best in class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our core backend services are built using a serverless model with AWS Lambda. This enables us to provide effectively unlimited scalability whilst also maintaining a cost effective solution. Our primary persistence mechanism is DynamoDB, where we leverage transactional features to provide an atomic, consistent, isolated durable and highly-available solution. Under the hood we leverage the full gamut of AWS monitoring and security services including CloudWatch, GuardDuty, Inspector, Detective and Security Hub.