TECH // SOCIAL GAMING | BUILD AT THE CORE
An integral part of creating an engaging and friendly social game comes from its connectivity through social networks such as Facebook, where users can share their achievements and experiences with friends. Platforms such as PapayaMobile and
Mobage provide social APIs and SDKs enabling developers to offer this social engagement through their own services, providing notifications, newsfeeds, chat rooms, leaderboards and achievements. “NgCore – part of Mobage – offers tried and tested social features that the majority of developers will be looking for, and as a company we work closely with developers to help design and optimise the social experience,” explains Ngmoco UK GM James DuBern. Mobage social APIs also allow users
to create their own avatars, a crucial aspect in establishing immersion and characterisation, whilst developers can monitor activity through social graphs and access in-game user data. PapyaMobile’s social SDK,
meanwhile, enables customisable challenges between players, and also allows users to recommend their favourite games to their friends through its platform. This is a crucial feature in most successful social games as it can allow a given title to go viral and attract thousands – and potentially millions – of new users.
Head of development at YoYo Games Mike Dailly believes that a fractured market is the biggest problem facing social and mobile developers, particularly where Facebook is concerned, and says that the company’s recently released GameMaker:Studio has been designed to help address this. “It offers a simple solution in that it unifies all the different targets into a single code base, while making simple multi-target output a reality,” he states. “The normal development cycle is to write a game or application, then port it to its nearest neighbour – Android to iOS for example – and then sometime down the line, rewrite the whole thing so it can go on Facebook; or vice-versa. “With GameMaker:Studio’s HTML5,
Android, iOS, Mac and Windows exporters, you can build content for every platform at once allowing you to maximise not only development resources, but also streamline marketing and promotions.”
ENRICHING THE EXPERIENCE Another feature hugely important to social game developers – and increasingly in all gaming markets including triple-A – is integrating monetisation options and fitting them seamlessly into the gaming experience. This needs to be done without interupting gameplay and creating inbalance, whilst also
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making sure users can show off their recent purchases to their friends. Gamesalad’s CEO Steve Felter says that in-app purchasing is quickly becoming the best way to monetise free-to-play social mobile games using virtual goods and currency. “The best way is to incorporate virtual goods into the free-to-play model so that monetisation is seamlessly integrated into the gameplay experience” states Felter. “Purchased items can be designed to have a direct impact on the gameplay, allowing players to show off various things they've purchased to their friends, or purchase items that provide a more satisfying experience.”
SCALING OUT Another important aspect for developers to consider is making sure their title is scalable for a sudden increase in user numbers. Given the large potential user-base in social gaming, word of mouth can spread quickly, particularly through social networks such as Facebook if a game is visible on a friend’s profile, meaning developers need to be prepared for vast waves of new players. Databases in MySQL and NoSQL offered by
companies such as Couchbase, which has powered games such as the hugely popular Draw Something by OMGPOP, mean that developers can provide a server space to help ensure users have a smooth-running
experience with little or no downtime disrupting their experience, which is very important when implementing updates. “Social games developers need to make
many decisions with respect to the software they use to develop their games,” says Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. “We think the selection of the database is one of the most important decisions a game developer will make. Making a wrong choice can severely impact a game’s performance and scalability, and a developer’s ability to rapidly develop and update their games.” Using a NoSQL database appears to be finding favour amongst developers due to its ability to record big data and scale rapidly, whilst MySQL is useful for studios expecting a high volume of micro-transactions. Eutechnyx CTO Andrew Perella, whose studio is developing social free-to-play racing simulator Auto Club Revolution, explains that the adoption of NoSQL databases has allowed games to scale and iterate rapidly without huge costs. Wittaker adds that these terabyte databases are often found powering social games, with NoSQL perhaps usurping MySQL as the standard for data storage in the sector.
NoSQL databases feel like they are
starting to replace MySQL as the first choice for the start-up studios.
Alex Wittaker, We R Interactive “Terabyte databases often sit behind social
games. In fact, this data often represents the value proposition in some titles,” he explains. “Schema-less [NoSQL] databases feel like they are starting to replace MySQL as the first choice for the start-up. They are naturally suited to ‘big data’ whereas pushing MySQL into these kind of sizes requires a complexity step change.” Given all the technology that is available to
developers on mobile and browser, professionals in the industry are in general agreement that there is great opportunity to create highly technical social games. Graeme Barlow, CEO of Greenspace studio RocketOwl, says that tech in the sector has now reached the level where developers are largely able to create the games they want to, with tools available in almost every aspect of development and distribution. “Tools are always the barrier for ambitious
developers, even on consoles and PC games,” he says. “It’s even truer on mobile and social platforms. That being said, we’ve hit a point in the development of the hardware and the tools that allows developers to do a lot of what they want to. There aren’t too many ideas or goals that are thrown off the table completely due to hardware or software limits.”
SOCIALLY AWKWARD But despite such a well-stocked foundation of technology for the sector, there are still many
JULY 2012 | 53
Top-to-bottom: Couchbase’s Bob Wiederhold, David Helgason from Unity, Graeme Barlow of RocketOwl, Ngmoco’s James DuBern and Mike Dailly from YoYo Games
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