For the fourth year in a row, in partnership with Diversi (a non-profit organisation which works for greater diversity within gaming), we offered female students a complimentary All Access pass to attend the 2019 Game Developer Conference in San Francisco and also an internship in one of our game studios. The scholarship is a part of our long term plan to encourage more female talent to join the games industry and so far has been a success, with all five scholars of 2018 joining King in full-time roles.

This year, the scholarship positions were tripled to fifteen, and the scholars have since returned from GDC ready to start their individual roles. We asked the scholars a few questions around their experiences at GDC, King as a workplace, and of course, an insight on the tech sessions at GDC! …

Don’t Repeat Job-self!

By Francisco Javier Garcia Orduna & David Campos Vall

At King, we use Jenkins extensively to build our games and execute our tests. All of King’s development departments use this tool as there is a high-throughput of screenings, which generate large volumes of diverse data. This requires a flexible approach when building integrated, scalable and robust computational workflows for building, as maintaining our games is challenging.

Jenkins You Say?

Jenkins is an open source implementation of a Continuous Integration (CI) server written in Java that can be used as a self-hosted option automating the build cycle for any project. It is a well-known, open-source continuous integration server. The CI is an established practice in software engineering and, especially at King, one that supports the development of complex software programs. A continuous integration server is designed to automatically or manually trigger complex workflows to build, test, and release software components. Normally these platforms also provide process monitoring, testing, and validation tools. …

By The Cloud Foundations Team at King

King’s journey to Google Cloud (GCP) began last year with the aim of taking advantage of the advanced tools and management services it offers. The migration of our infrastructure to GCP has enabled a huge increase in scaling ability as well as improvements in the development cycle for our products.

Securing our platform has been a top priority since we decided to move to Google Cloud. In this post, we will explain our thoughts on some of the proposed solutions for credentials rotation, describe our requirements and introduce the solution that was implemented.

“Our infrastructure needs to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections per second, as well as our data warehouse, and we saw that Google has the capacity to handle our needs. …

By Pol Vilaseca Mainar and Pietro Guardascione

First published on Gamasutra 7th Jan 2019.

Hero was an action RPG that was developed by King and soft launched during 2016 in different countries in Asia. In the game, you could choose among three heroes (warrior, mage or archer) to play through levels that consisted of sets of successive combats against groups of enemies of various types.

Although the game was cancelled before making it to a global release, the design challenges that we faced during its development gave us some valuable learnings about designing mobile RPGs. …

By Alex Nodet — Artificial Intelligence Engineer

King, like many other game companies, follows a free-to-play business model. This trend has increased within the gaming industry in recent years. Its efficiency is driven by frequent releases of new in-game content.

As of October 2018, Candy Crush Saga offers more than 3,700 levels to its players, and 15 new ones are released every week. Offering high-quality content is one of our core values at King. Therefore it is important to make sure that every level we release is correctly balanced. One traditional way is to ask playtesters for feedback. …

By Adam Carroll

Introduction

It’s time for a festive post on the King Tech Blog! A few weeks ago I released the first full version of Santulator, a fun, Open Source program to help you to run Secret Santa draws. I’m from a big family and I initially wrote this with families in mind but it has since proven to be useful for office Secret Santa draws too. It’s completely free, so download it and give it a try yourself. Santulator is a personal project and not a King project.

Since this is a technology blog, I’d like to share some details about how Santulator works. The project is under active development so I’ve fixed all the links to v1.1.0 to avoid them becoming stale as changes are made in the project on a regular basis. …

By James Glass, Xavier Gibert & Zuzanna Kruszczynska

On each Hack Day at King, we round-up tech gurus from far and wide with a creative range of ideas on how to improve the technologies and internal tools that we use.

Our recent Barcelona Hack Day event gave King employees a chance to take a break from daily work to collaborate and connect with new Kingsters.

It’s also where new product ideas can come to life!

From hacks designed around improving ticket features on JIRA, to increasing our time-efficiency using software tools. …

By Kenneth MacArthur and Nicholas Brenwald

King’s recent attendance at Google Cloud Next ’18 London offered a stage (or several!) where we could share our knowledge and experience working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) thus far, and our ideas for leveraging GCP in the future.

King took part in a series of sessions at Next about our ongoing GCP analytics platform migration, including Rethinking Big Data: Moving from Complex Analytics to Actionable Insights with Google Cloud, where we had the opportunity to share with Google’s Sudhir Hasbe the progress of our petabyte-scale migration to GCP.

Below is an edited version of our interview with Sudhir. …