Everything But the Game

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(No Transcript)
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Everything But the Game

• Robert Mitchell
• Senior Programmer
• Sony Online Entertainment

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Outline Everything but the Game

• Introduction and motivation
• Game, Not Game, Not Covered
• Everything But the Game
• Questions and answers

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Background and Bias

• Sony Online Entertainment since 1999
• Trivial Pursuit, PlanetSide, EverQuest II
• Platform Group
• Login Server
• Chat Server
• Web extensions
• /pizza
• and more

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Preconceived Expectations

• From the players
• Without the game, nothing else matters
• Friends and community are everything
• A game gets one chance to make a good first
  impression
• From developers and publishers
• An online game is a service
• Customer support costs are significant
• An online game is never done

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Adding Value as the Developer

• Ways to make more money
• add more players
• improve retention
• reduce costs
• boost development team efficiency
• create additional revenue streams
• The game is the game
• Leaving Everything But the Game

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Game

• Art and Audio
• Game play systems
• Tools
• Graphics rendering
• User interface
• The game client
• Server code
• Database persistence
• Lots more!

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Not Covered

• The right way
• Installers
• Process for ltinsert taskgt
• Network/server management
• Customer service policies
• Marketing Sales
• Legal, Accounting,

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Everything But the Game

• Patcher
• Chat and messages
• Localization
• User authentication
• Billing
• Customer support tools
• Test/Debugging tools
• Community tools
• Web/Mobile extensions
• And more

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Warning Warp speed ahead

• Each of the following topics is likely suitable
  for an entire presentation
• The intent is to give you a flavor of some
  potential implementations and pitfalls and to
  give you a place to begin
• Your requirements, constraints, and business
  objectives may be significantly different

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Patching

• Updates to the client
• bug fixes
• new content
• Digital distribution
• Pre-stage files
• Dont forget about the server

• Potential Solutions
• HTTP Get
• BitTorrent
• Subversion API
• Windows BITS
• Traditional upgrades
• Enhancements
• Compression
• Deltas
• Supporting multiple client versions

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Chat

• Community is build around the ability to
  communicate
• 101 ways to talk, shout, whisper,
• Emotes
• Friends and ignore lists
• Good grief! Spam and profanity and
• Lawful intercept or the art of snooping
• Voice chat
• Video chat

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Persistent Messages

• Because your friends and guild are not always
  online
• Mailbox access
• Storage limitations
• To guilds
• Item/coin transfer
• Spam ! fun

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Localization (L10N and I18N)

• Simple String replacement or lookup
• Complex Grammar engine
• More than just text
• date/time and number formatting
• currency and units of measure
• sorting
• UTF-8 vs Unicode vs ASCII
• French, Italian, German, Spanish - FIGS

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User Authentication

• The foundation for persistence
• Login name versus public name
• Lost passwords
• Shared passwords
• Parental controls

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Billing

• Show me the money!
• Think about expansions and flags for specific
  features
• And people without credit cards
• And FRAUD!
• And taxes. And
• Let someone else worry about this one

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Transfer Tools

• If you have persistent player characters and more
  than one server, engineer for the ability to
  transfer characters between them
• Balancing populations
• Debugging live players on test servers
• Players moving between servers
• Maintain community like server types
• Prevent avoiding accountability

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Customer Support Tools

• With privilege comes responsibility
• If a player can do it have a way for CS to do
  it and undo it even if the character is offline
• Have a way to determine if the player has done
  it
• Knowledge base
• Ways to report bugs and abuse

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Logging

• Log everything of value
• Parse it, mine it, summarize it, track it
• Control the volume and focus of debugging data
• Automate logging of crashes and other outliers
  and exceptions. Monitor them.

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Monitoring

• Because no one likes it when the boss asks what
  happened? and you dont know that anything
  happened.
• Like logging but with active alerts
• Fault detection, hardware issues, crashes
• Watch load and populations and anything else that
  starts to be predictive of failures
• And track your economy and level progression and
  revenues

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Security Issues

• Never trust the client. Never put anything on the
  client. The client is in the hands of the enemy.
  Never ever ever forget this. Raph Koster
• Includes anything sent to/from the client
• Expect users to search for and to find exploits
  and ways to automate the game
• Avoid making the hackers task simple

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Test and Debugging Tools

• Automated testing
• Load testing
• Fake groups and guilds
• The ability to do anything
• The ability to replay what happened
• The ability to ask what if?

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Community Tools

• Forums
• Leader boards and achievements
• Player information
• Guild pages
• Blogs
• Game video to web
• The social network / web 2.0 stuff

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Web and mobile extensions

• Interactive maps
• Interaction with your vendors and guild
• Mini-games with in-game results
• All those micromanagement tasks
• Just dont have it call me at midnight

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Match Making

• Looking for group?
• PlanetSide Instant Action
• PvP lobbies
• And the traditional find me an opponent

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Auctions and Microtransactions

• Real-money transfers are here
• In-game advertising revenue
• Alternate business models
• Getting a cut of the profit would be nice
• Design the game with this in mind

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Priorities

• Different games and different developers will
  have different priorities
• The order of the presentation is close to my
  personal preferences
• Do what you can
• Use anything already available

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Questions and answers
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Thanks

• Sony Online Entertainment Platform Group and RD
  Team
• PlanetSide and EverQuest II Game Teams
• Online Game Developers Conference