Puzzle Pirates

Lessons from an Indie MMOG

Ye Olde Treasure Map

(Design Principles)

Going on the Account(Crew principles and operations)

1. Underpants2. ?

3. Profits!

Punintended Consequences

Release Timeline

Code Growth

Media Growth

Technical Architecture

Just kidding...

Technical Architecture

Bandwidth Utilization

Technical tidbits:- Average message size: Incoming message: 46 bytes Outgoing message: 125 bytes- Bandwidth usage: Incoming per user: 6.6 bps Outgoing per user: 94 bps

Code Breakdown

The Joy of Open SourceTools:

CVS (version control)Subversion (version control)Ant (build system)Jar bundler (Mac installer)StatCVS (project statistics)Proguard (code compression)Perl (scripting language)Ruby (scripting language)Emacs, Vi, etc. (editors, religions)SSH (secure communications)gnuplot (statistics graphing)

Communication:JSPWiki, MediaWiki (design docs, info sharing)GAIM/Jabber (instant messenger)OpenOffice (word processing, this presentation)Mailman (mailing lists)Everything in the “back office”: authentication, email, backups, etc.

Rolled our own:Two Due (project management)Getdown (game deployment/patches)Bling! (billing system)Mirror (publishing to server clusters)

Libraries:Apache Commons: Codec, Collections: Digester, IO, LangjChart (statistics graphing)Junit (unit testing)Velocity (web page, email generation)XML Writer (XML generation)

Operations:Linux (operating system)FreeBSD (operating system)MySQL (database)Apache (web server)Jetty (servlet container)phpBB (message boards)mvnForum (message boards)AWStats (web stats tracking)OTRS (customer support)Flyspray (bug tracking)Cricket (server monitoring)

Usage GrowthThe Ebbs and Flows

Simultaneous Usage

Fun facts!Pirates per user: 1.3Avg session: 48 minAvg per day: 145 minSessions per day: 3Plays from morethan one computer: 10%

The Joy of Internet Distribution

The Joy of Internet Distribution

(cont.)

Bootynomics

Inflation

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

Oceans and their Masters

(‘n mistresses, too!)

Doubloonacy!(Being an account o’ profits, or

lack o’ them)

Subscribers

Sorry!

Pieces o’ Eight!

Sorry!

http://djames.org/gdc/

Ubi box art not yet released to public