Game Geek Speak

John from the Darkstar forums (and project team member? I’m not sure), has posted a short video of Keith Thompson (one of the Project Darkstar Server engineers) showing a demo at 2009’s Austin GDC. The video is a bit hard to watch if you’re sensitive to shaky motion, but it’s worth it if you’re a big enough geek, like me.

Apparently, the Snowman demo game is running on two servers, and the load can be dynamically managed so that if one server reaches a limit, clients will be moved onto the second server. Interestingly, this means both clients that are logging in and clients that are already in the middle of a game. The load is balanced transparently by Darkstar, with clients continuing without a hitch.

Looks like they also have some decent monitoring tools. I wonder if those will get released to the community?

I wish them all the best, because I’m using Darkstar for most (possibly all) of my future games. Go Darkstar team!!

I’ve taken up the role of Director of Games for an exciting startup called Yawma. It’s an online retailer specifically for digital goods of the indie variety: games, music, applications, etc. The twist is that Yawma has a unique distribution model (which, unfortunately, I cannot say anything about right now). The developer revenue share is generous compared to portal sites like Big Fish Games, Amazon, etc. If I had some downloadable games I thought were worthy of sale, I’d sign up with Yawma myself.

So, if you have a downloadable game you would like to talk about, I can be reached at jason [@] yawma.net.

–Jason

P.S. This doesn’t adversely affect my development progress, because I’m a multitasking madman. *howls at the moon*

The microtransaction bug seems to be going viral these days among the Flash community. There are a growing number of companies offering managed payment services to Flash developers: they handle the dirty backside, and you give them content and share the income.

I personally think that it is worth it to build your own system (and I’m usually the guy saying, “Use the middleware, fool!”). But I think it depends on the scale of what you are planning. In my case, I want total control, and I want to own access to my customers so that I can continue to communicate with them. I also don’t want my games to become advertisements for a payment service.

I don’t view virtual item sales as just a sales channel. It’s also a gesture that means a player cares about and is emotionally invested in the game, and I want to maximize that relationship to make my players happy, long-term customers. Without access to my customers, the payment service is crippling my business. I don’t know that all these systems insulate the developer from his/her customers, but that is a major issue to bear in mind.

These Flash-specific services could be really useful to someone who is making much smaller scale games and wants some add-on sales or someone experimenting with virtual goods in an effort to diminish reliance on ad revenue. I’m not reviewing any of the services, just announcing that they exist. I haven’t investigated them all very deeply, but I will be poking around.

75% – andrograde.com
70% – www.nonoba.com
60% – www.gamersafe.com
60% – www.mochimedia.com
50% – www.heyzap.com

Which is best? It depends on your goals and plans. If you’re just making little quickie games (90% of Flash games), then any of the above would work. If you have a more broadly scoped business plan, you might want to steer clear and look into services that are not Flash-specific and spend the time/money to do the integration yourself.