Phoenix Labs with Jesse Houston

Mark Mandel and Jon Foust return this week to host Jesse Houston, CEO of Phoenix Labs. Jesse goes into detail about their online, multiplayer game Dauntless, a hunting action game that brings friends together from every platform to fight giant monsters. Users can even switch platforms, say from Xbox to Playstation, and pick up right where they left off.

Later in the show, Jesse describes the hurdles of building such a huge game and how Phoenix Labs overcame them. Late nights and holiday hours helped them create "no downtime deploys", so users can continue to play even as the game updates. Because big projects sometimes come with big problems, Jesse also emphasized the importance of developing crisis management skills to help get through tough times. We talk more specifically about what it takes to build and run Dauntless, from GCP products such as GKE, Bigtable, and BigQuery, to tricks with scaling and management. In the future, Dauntless will be available on the Switch, new expansions will be released, and more.

Jesse Houston

Jesse Houston is a games industry veteran with over 18 years experience in the gaming space. Houston fell in love with games at an early age and found his footing in the games industry by applying to a QA position in a local paper. Previously, Houston has held lead producer roles at both Riot Games on League of Legends, and BioWare on the Mass Effect series. He also served as Production Director at Ubisoft, overseeing Technical Project Management, Pipeline Planning, Development and Design, among other responsibilities. Houston formed Phoenix Labs with Sean Bender and Robin Mayne to create deep multiplayer games that bring players together.

Cool things of the week

• Virtual display devices for Compute Engine are now GA blog
• Container-native load balancing on GKE are now GA blog
• How to deploy a Windows container on Google Compute Engine blog
• Agones 1.0 site

Interview

• Phoenix Labs site
• Dauntless site
• Dauntless Updates site
• Dauntless on Twitter twitter
• Cloud Bigtable site
• Kubernetes site
• BigQuery site
• GKE site
• Redis site
• Introducing Google Customer Reliability Engineering blog
• Cloud SQL site

Question of the week

What is the difference between Premium vs Standard network?

Where can you find us next?

Jesse will be speaking at the Montreal International Game Summit. You can see Phoenix Labs at many other gaming conferences, including Pax, TwitchCon, and GDC.

Mark is taking some vacation time, then he'll be at Kubecon.

Jon will also be at Kubecon, as well as taking some personal time to attend several weddings.

Sound Effect Attribution

• "Fantasy Orchestra" by BigManJoe of Freesound.org