Game Geek Speak

You can’t really swing a dead cat without hitting somebody’s virtual goods payment platform anymore. I mean, there’s fatfoogoo, Gambit, TwoFish, TrialPay, Mochi Coins, PayByCash, LiveGamer, UKash, Kongregate (in November) and on and on and on. I just scratched the surface there.

It’s really getting crowded! With my new game project in production, I’m starting to wonder which one I can trust to still be around in a couple of years. There are so many, I can’t see the market supporting them all.

Some of them are “big accounts only” type companies, where you can’t find pricing or really any information on their websites without calling them. And they expect you to be a million-dollar funded company. Those types will be servicing EA and UbiSoft and other large companies. Whether they are around or not doesn’t matter to me because I won’t be their client anyway.

The others are scrappy and service small companies. These are the guys I’m likely to do business with, but also the ones most likely to bite the dust when the shakedown happens. They just won’t all have the customer base to make it through a financial storm on top of vicious competition due to overcrowding.

Anyone have experience with these companies? Which ones do you like, and what services make them stand out? Some offer great looking metrics and other perks. I’m in the market and looking right now.

I’m starting on a new game project! There’s a minimal site and blog for it. Please have a look.

Spirits of Gaia: an online multiplayer world.

I am building the server side code on Project Darkstar. I’ve already got a pretty nice hunk of code constructed, but there’s a long way to go still. I haven’t started on the client at all, but it will be built on the PushButton Engine.

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time with Project Darkstar. I put in tens of hours reading forum posts and anything else I could get my hands on. I built a very simple MUD with it, and I looked through a bunch of other people’s code. When Darkstar delivers, it will be really amazing, and what exists today is already very cool. It offers solutions to some monstrously difficult problems.

Probably the best thing I found was that you can treat your game logic like a single threaded application. You never have to touch locks or synchronization unless you go under the application layer (a place I feared to tread).

The data store is also really cool, because you can stop worrying about game crashes and if that will force you to roll back hours of gameplay–it won’t. At most, a few seconds are lost. That’s a huge worry out of the way. One problem here, though, is that there’s no easy way to upgrade or patch the data store unless you wipe it and restart from scratch. You’ll have to write a custom tool to update it without wiping it.

All that said, the real issue holding Darkstar back right now is that it simply isn’t finished. It’s almost finished (give it 6 more months), but there’s one key feature that is a show stopper for me: it doesn’t scale. It can’t do anything besides a single-node right now. If you run multi-node, each node will be isolated, which is the same end result.

This really disappoints me, because the technology is otherwise really powerful, and I like it a lot. Sometime near the end of 2009, the roadmap says the PDS team will have multinode completed. When that happens, Darkstar will finally be a very potent game server solution! And I’ll be going back to it.

Until then, what next? I’m going to look into the Neutron service from Exit Games. (Update: After some deeper digging, I don’t think this is what I’m looking for, although I will still give it an eyeball. It also feels like it’s going to be on the expensive side.)

(Update 2: After some pacing around the house and thinking, I have come up with a couple of options for how to continue to use Darkstar for my upcoming game. I haven’t decided exactly what path to take yet, but I think it will be worth it to try and make it work. I’m counting on you, Darkstar team!! )