Tribeca Film Festival: Tribeca Games

The client

Tribeca Film Festival is an annual film and arts festival that takes place each spring in New York City. Each year the festival hosts over 600 screenings with approximately 150,000 attendees coming from all over the world.

As a part of the festival, guests have the opportunity to play a selection of brand new video games before they are released to the public. Tribeca Games features 8 cutting edge, pre-release games which users can play remotely during a timed slot.

The challenge

Tribeca partnered with Australian-headquartered agency Akcelo and technology company Parsec, utilising their recently launched API to create a branded and bespoke game experience platform that enables fans to play remotely whilst not sacrificing performance or requiring additional hardware or upgrades. Akcelo had also set up AWS Lambda functions to support the game slot booking system, via the Parsec API.

Both the Ackelo and Tribeca teams required the platform and its hosting to be supported and maintained by a technical team who would be available 24/7 to ensure that players could access Parsec and their chosen games from their personal computer during their time slot with no issues.

They also required a team who could manage feedback from end-users as it came in, picking up any problems immediately, triaging them and escalating them to the right technical team.

The solution

Just After Midnight are the go-to support people for mission-critical platforms that require full-stack technical support around the clock.

As an AWS Advanced Partner with a global team of AWS accredited engineers and application engineers working around the clock, we had eyes on both the platform and hosting 24/7, proactively monitoring and resolving issues when they arose.

Our Incident Management team supports the engineers, picking up alerts from our monitoring systems, triaging and escalating where necessary.

The team was briefed on the complex technology used by Akcelo that would enable players to access the games remotely, including:

• The full infrastructure spec created on Paperspace, a gaming-specific VM hosting platform
• Parsec, the RDP client, and the AWS Lambda functions set up to manage the syncing of bookings in the booking system SquadUp via the Parsec API

Once the event started, our global team provided eyes-on monitoring and support 24/7 for both the application and infrastructure, working closely with Akcelo to resolve issues where required.

Additionally, our Incident Management team were made aware of any issues that end users may experience whilst trying to access the games, so that they could troubleshoot and solve issues as they were reported directly from players.

Results

• Zero downtime on the platform during our support hours
• Having a full-stack technical and incident management team working 24/7 to resolve application, infrastructure and end-user issues eased the minds of the Tribeca Games team and Ackelo
• All end-user issues picked up by our team within minutes