Here’s a great post-mortem on Growtopia (launched 2012, developed by a team of two) It’s slightly buried in there, but I spotted this:
networking
Hume just posted his Lessons Learned from the warmup for Ludum Dare 23 (48 hours to write a game from scratch – starts this weekend!) – and his positive experience using an Entity System. In his epic comment (sparked by a different Adam – not me, honest), is this gem: […]
Spotted this (the notion “DevOps”) courtesy of Matthew Weigel, a term I’d fortunately missed-out on. It seems to come down to: Software Developers (programmers who write apps that a company sells) and Ops people (sysadmins who manage servers) don’t talk enough and don’t respect each other; this cause problems when […]
Ubisoft just bought Qazal – one of the last providers of networking tech for games. Congrats to the Qazal folks; although the price isn’t mentioned, I’d imagine a lot of them have picked up a nice windfall from this. The problem Two problems: one immediate, anti-competitive, affecting games using this […]
Wifi and internet at all is a priviledge – but Free Wifi is something that in our modern society, and the society we’re set to become, needs to be treated as a right. When I started writing this, I was looking at the benefits we have yet to see (ubiquitous […]
With some WordPress-Fu, I’ve added a page that’s a category and auto-includes links with custom meta-information. Or, in other words, there’s now a page where I can effortlessly post all my various bookmarked links to do with MMO development – and add my own commentary to each link – which […]
I’ve made a small simple but complete java NIO server (with full source included) that is free for anyone to use for anything. At the moment, it only deals with sending and receiving strings, and isn’t optimized, but if anyone wants to improve it and send me the changes then […]
Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! (because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…) Questions, questions… First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the […]
Years ago, I found the spritesheets + source code from the author of SFE, who was offering them up if anyone wanted to improve it, make it 4 player multiplayer again (like on RISC OS) etc (or something like that). Last Sunday afternoon I was very bored, and found just […]
Networked games use the internet, and the difficulties of making these games evolve on Internet Time, which means that the articles people wrote as recently as a year ago on how to make a networked or multiplayer game are already out of date. Most of the literature is more than […]
A few years ago, I wrote an article for Develop magazine – “10 MMOs you don’t want to do”. Here’s 8 things you really shouldn’t do but that might seem like a good idea if you’ve never made an MMOG before. All these are examples of things that have been […]
…was my section in the fourth GPG book from Charles River Media. And, sadly, although I tried to put some resources up on the web, a series of unfortunate events led to that all disappearing. But now … they’re back! (and I’ll be adding more followup stuff in the coming […]
UPDATE: short, complete, 42-slide version now available from the CMP website – https://www.cmpevents.com/sessions/GD/S5762i1.ppt …but if you want the 144-slide version (!), see below. No extra content.
A few years ago, entity systems (or component systems) were a hot topic. In particular, Scott Bilas gave a great GDC talk (http://scottbilas.com/files/2002/gdc_san_jose/game_objects_slides.pdf – updated link thanks to @junkdogAP) on using them in the development of Dungeon Siege. The main advantages to entity systems were: No programmer required for designers […]
An article I wrote for Gamasutra’s Game Career Guide: Part 1 – What to study Part 2 – Practice and Experience …hopefully this will be useful to some of the many people interested in network programming but not sure where to start. Also, you might want to have a look […]