Forums » General
As of the beginning of March:
A lot of people are waiting for the faction changes. The good news is: it's about half-done! The bad news is, it may still be delayed a couple of weeks. February has been.. interesting, for us, which I'll go into in a moment..
I'm giving a talk at the Game Developers Conference next week, which is considered to be a pretty cool thing for our industry. But, on top of that, I've also been invited to give another talk the day before, which just happened a few weeks ago, where I'll also be presenting parts of a paper that Ray and I.. just wrote. Google and some others had been bugging us for the info in this paper for.. like nine months or so, and this seemed as good a time as any to get it done and put it out there for other developers.
This was all well and good, and mostly stuff that impacted my time and not Ray or Michael's time. Until late last week when we received a kind of emergency invite, out of the blue, to make our game run on.. umm.. an important upcoming operating system. This OS is not publicly available, so Ray flew out to California and has been there all week. This was an interesting opportunity, for us to be on this platform really "early" (which could have a number of advantages), and is not costing us anything, so.. we rolled with it.
This did delay the faction stuff a bit.
In the meantime, we've also been talking with people like Google and Amazon and others about possibly "featuring" the game in various ways. Being "featured" on the Android Market yields.. many downloads (depends on the size of the game download, accessibility, interest level). Probably 30-60,000 per day, based on what other developers have told me. I've heard rumors sometimes of 100k+ days as well. Featuring can be for two weeks, so a million new people is common in that timeframe. To put that in perspective, this could make the influx of people from the Verizon TV ads look like.. well.. barely a blip on the radar, and in a much shorter period of time.
This sounds great, but since we're an MMO, it's also a little scary. Our server cluster can handle quite a large number of players, depending on gameplay types.. assuming absolutely everyone isn't doing Deneb Skirmishes. Plus we expanded our server cluster capacity a couple of months ago. The game server was always intended to be upwardly scalable to very large numbers, but we have a limited number of CPUs/cores currently, and some sectors and constructs will need tweaking to scale more linearly.
Plus, it doesn't really matter on the server-side whether these people stick around for very long or not, just how many of them show up at once. So, even though the conversion rate on mobile might be relatively small, we could still have a kind of scary number of newbies.
As a hedge against running out of hardware entirely, Michael has been enhancing and testing the EC2 implementation of the server we built last year. This will also require looking at things like.. instancing the newbie sectors, so like every N users or so get a new "version" of the same sector, and we don't end up with a thousand newbies trying to fly around in a given sector. EC2 is also useful for doing rollouts in other regions. There's been some strong interest in us in the Chinese and South Korean markets, so that's another benefit.
Michael's work is nearing completion, and Ray will be back tomorrow, so you should see some gameplay-related development commencing next week. I will be back after that, and will then be focusing on the.. Next thing, which is:
On (roughly) April 19th, we're going to do a celebration of a decade online. That is measured from the launch of the original 2002 Public Alpha announcement on Penny-Arcade. I'm aiming to have a bunch of gameplay stuff done by then, which is going to be.. interesting to get done in time. But we will be doing quite a bit of press and advertising stuff, with Penny Arcade and some others. So, basically, you can be pretty damned sure there'll be faction changes in place before then, and hopefully some other substantive improvements.
So, this is shaping up to be another really chaotic first-quarter for us, much like last year (when we released on Android while I was at GDC, and I modeled/shipped the capship station on an Atom netbook in a Bay Area Starbucks. No, that's not why it looks so.. different, that's purely a scale issue).
The talk / paper stuff may not sound very "game beneficial", but it's useful for us to do this kind of thing in our industry; it creates business development opportunities and is good "PR", plus we do genuinely like helping other developers. That said, public speaking is roughly as appealing to me (personally) as a root canal, so I really wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't in our best interest.
I wanted to give people a heads-up about what's going on, and why we're doing.. what we're doing. I imagine certain responses may include the usual "sarcasm doomy doom doom everything is always delayed embittered doom", which is fine. But I think the thing in April may be pretty cool. We hope so anyway, we're spending quite a bit on it.
A lot of people are waiting for the faction changes. The good news is: it's about half-done! The bad news is, it may still be delayed a couple of weeks. February has been.. interesting, for us, which I'll go into in a moment..
I'm giving a talk at the Game Developers Conference next week, which is considered to be a pretty cool thing for our industry. But, on top of that, I've also been invited to give another talk the day before, which just happened a few weeks ago, where I'll also be presenting parts of a paper that Ray and I.. just wrote. Google and some others had been bugging us for the info in this paper for.. like nine months or so, and this seemed as good a time as any to get it done and put it out there for other developers.
This was all well and good, and mostly stuff that impacted my time and not Ray or Michael's time. Until late last week when we received a kind of emergency invite, out of the blue, to make our game run on.. umm.. an important upcoming operating system. This OS is not publicly available, so Ray flew out to California and has been there all week. This was an interesting opportunity, for us to be on this platform really "early" (which could have a number of advantages), and is not costing us anything, so.. we rolled with it.
This did delay the faction stuff a bit.
In the meantime, we've also been talking with people like Google and Amazon and others about possibly "featuring" the game in various ways. Being "featured" on the Android Market yields.. many downloads (depends on the size of the game download, accessibility, interest level). Probably 30-60,000 per day, based on what other developers have told me. I've heard rumors sometimes of 100k+ days as well. Featuring can be for two weeks, so a million new people is common in that timeframe. To put that in perspective, this could make the influx of people from the Verizon TV ads look like.. well.. barely a blip on the radar, and in a much shorter period of time.
This sounds great, but since we're an MMO, it's also a little scary. Our server cluster can handle quite a large number of players, depending on gameplay types.. assuming absolutely everyone isn't doing Deneb Skirmishes. Plus we expanded our server cluster capacity a couple of months ago. The game server was always intended to be upwardly scalable to very large numbers, but we have a limited number of CPUs/cores currently, and some sectors and constructs will need tweaking to scale more linearly.
Plus, it doesn't really matter on the server-side whether these people stick around for very long or not, just how many of them show up at once. So, even though the conversion rate on mobile might be relatively small, we could still have a kind of scary number of newbies.
As a hedge against running out of hardware entirely, Michael has been enhancing and testing the EC2 implementation of the server we built last year. This will also require looking at things like.. instancing the newbie sectors, so like every N users or so get a new "version" of the same sector, and we don't end up with a thousand newbies trying to fly around in a given sector. EC2 is also useful for doing rollouts in other regions. There's been some strong interest in us in the Chinese and South Korean markets, so that's another benefit.
Michael's work is nearing completion, and Ray will be back tomorrow, so you should see some gameplay-related development commencing next week. I will be back after that, and will then be focusing on the.. Next thing, which is:
On (roughly) April 19th, we're going to do a celebration of a decade online. That is measured from the launch of the original 2002 Public Alpha announcement on Penny-Arcade. I'm aiming to have a bunch of gameplay stuff done by then, which is going to be.. interesting to get done in time. But we will be doing quite a bit of press and advertising stuff, with Penny Arcade and some others. So, basically, you can be pretty damned sure there'll be faction changes in place before then, and hopefully some other substantive improvements.
So, this is shaping up to be another really chaotic first-quarter for us, much like last year (when we released on Android while I was at GDC, and I modeled/shipped the capship station on an Atom netbook in a Bay Area Starbucks. No, that's not why it looks so.. different, that's purely a scale issue).
The talk / paper stuff may not sound very "game beneficial", but it's useful for us to do this kind of thing in our industry; it creates business development opportunities and is good "PR", plus we do genuinely like helping other developers. That said, public speaking is roughly as appealing to me (personally) as a root canal, so I really wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't in our best interest.
I wanted to give people a heads-up about what's going on, and why we're doing.. what we're doing. I imagine certain responses may include the usual "sarcasm doomy doom doom everything is always delayed embittered doom", which is fine. But I think the thing in April may be pretty cool. We hope so anyway, we're spending quite a bit on it.
Wow... sounds like I may have to polish up my noobing skills. This could make flying around Dau like shooting fish in a barrel :D
Congrats on all this exciting stuff, devs.
Don't worry about Deneb. We're still stuck with 8 people in a group, remember? :P
Good news!
Good news!
Sounds like an exciting time for you guys. April.... sounds about right for me to make a come back and get sucked in with all the newbs and ram roids and complain that I can't cast a "hold the fuck still" spell on the bots.
Sounds exciting and promising.
Did I hear "San Francisco VO meetup" in the middle of that post somewhere?
I think even the "sarcasm doomy doom doom everything is always delayed embittered doom-ers" prefer that we get a post like this on the forums, rather than nothing. So kudos for doing this.
More players is something we all want, and not something that you can code in, so this should be viewed as just as exciting as the faction updates.
/me wonders what this odd new OS is
More players is something we all want, and not something that you can code in, so this should be viewed as just as exciting as the faction updates.
/me wonders what this odd new OS is
Well TheRedSpy, I hear that the new thing is embedding computers inside your fridge, so that you can pull up recipes in the kitchen. Soon (tm), our moms will join us in space, with a fresh side of pizza bagels!
Yes, I'm so going to try and swing a VO pre-load on a refrigerator, just to.. have done that.
Hah, you may jest all you wish incarnate and pizzasgood, but if you actually did put VO on a fridge I bet there are mums out there that would mine ores while cooking or something lol. Don't tell me they don't use those internet fridges for farmville!
Anyway, looks like I won't have to buy a new computer since my calculator will run VO soon.
Anyway, looks like I won't have to buy a new computer since my calculator will run VO soon.
Inc, it sounds like you have your own variant of Rule 34 going on there. Do you have someone to talk to about your little... issue?
Sounds really exciting. It's good to hear your business side of things is getting better and better. Because that benefits us players in the end :D
Exciting news, exciting times! Thanks Inc.
You could use your fridge to mine Ice Yos.
2002? I can't even remember when I signed on, but I think I hold the 98th account. I would attend a San Francisco VO Meetup.
2002? I can't even remember when I signed on, but I think I hold the 98th account. I would attend a San Francisco VO Meetup.
Speculation: the new OS is Blackberry 10.
Great news devs!
''Speculation: the new OS is Blackberry 10.''
I hope not. I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble here but it's probably a waste of time supporting everyone's proprietary mobile OS. I think now that android is done the marketing opportunities associated with it should be pursued as a priority rather than more ports.
Need to get on that web analytics too Incarnate and see what your demographics are like for browsers. If you website is receiving x% hits from a certain platform its probably your best target for gamers too.
I hope not. I don't mean to burst anyone's bubble here but it's probably a waste of time supporting everyone's proprietary mobile OS. I think now that android is done the marketing opportunities associated with it should be pursued as a priority rather than more ports.
Need to get on that web analytics too Incarnate and see what your demographics are like for browsers. If you website is receiving x% hits from a certain platform its probably your best target for gamers too.
Aye, running any business these days is about being flexible and grabbing every chance, GL Inc.
Is the new OS the steam console? :s