With many start-ups such as We R Interactive entering the social gaming space with titles like football sim I Am PlayR, knowing what tools to harness and finding the most cost-effective solutions can be crucial to their success. The UK studio’s CTO Alex Wittaker
offers a plethora of tips to start-ups looking to compete with the enormous number of social and mobile games crowding the space, and make the most out of the tools and tech available. “It might feel like putting the cart
before the horse, but deciding on how you are going to make your money will strongly influence your choice of solutions,” he states. “Say you want to go for free-to-play with microtransactions then you will either need to select a platform that supports this model – Kongregate, Facebook, Chrome, etcetera – or you are going to have to provide some of that infrastructure yourself. “You are always going to have to
serve your web app from somewhere so in many ways you are missing a trick if you do not offer services over and above the minimum. Facebook pushes some of the invitation management responsibilities onto your server. You need to accept that some server side development will be needed. So Ruby, Python, PHP,
“Making these games work as seamlessly as possible is a challenge but is necessary for success. A full social game is no longer just about writing a little Facebook game, sitting back and waiting for the cash to roll in. More users are turning to their mobile devices to play, so social games have to adapt.”
PUSHING BOUNDARIES With this ability to scale to multiple platforms and serve millions of users, whilst also keeping them engaged in the long-term, social gaming could eventually replace many traditional triple-A titles, or at the very least have similar features integrated into a blockbuster title.
Dailly criticises the current state of games at the top-end of the scale for a lack of creativity, especially given the lack of risk developers are afforded with budgets upward of $50 million, and believes social gaming is becoming a much more attractive proposition for developers as they are able to immerse and engage their users in their titles for the long-term. “Social game budgets will increase, but they will be far more realistic than current triple-A projects,” he says. “But
JavaScript; pick one and expect to be surprised at how large your code base will grow. Good coding practice will pay dividends here.” He goes on to explain that when
selecting a scalable server, services such as Apache are a natural choice and scale well with a traffic manager, whilst Node.js is advantageous to small teams that want to concentrate expertise, although it is not widely proven at scale. “If you are consuming cycles on a
server then you are presumably going to want to record state and that means some means of data storage,” he explains. “If you are going for high volume – microtransactions – then again consider what happens at scale. MySQL is a natural fit and comes as part of the LAMP architecture, but your data sets can rapidly outstrip the single terabyte range, so be sure that you are comfortable managing tables that spread across clusters of machines. Cassandra and other schema-less variants are in the ascendancy and are again free to use, but keep in mind that this is new technology still evolving. One attraction is that there are several commercial players in this space now, such as DataStax and Acunu, giving you an escape plan if managing your data corpus becomes a time sink.”
unlike triple-A titles, social games have the advantage of releasing and updating once they’ve shown momentum. Developers don't have to produce a massive game only to find out no one wants to play it. This makes social games far more cost effective for publishers so they are likely to increase in number.”
A CONNECTED FUTURE It appears then that the social gaming sector will continue its astronomic rise, offering ever-more ambitious connected experiences more akin to that of triple-A titles than the typical 2D variants often seen in the browser and mobile games currently. Ngmoco’s DuBern says that the outlook for the genre looks rosey, and will continue to improve as the tech behind it becomes ever-more powerful. “The future is incredibly positive for social gaming, particularly mobile. Early signs point to the rest of the world following the success seen in Japan, which we are at the forefront of,” he says. “The mobile tech will continue to improve, and this will provide more and more opportunities for talented games developers.”