Building Big Social Games

Building BIG Social Games Amitt Mahajan Lead Developer - FarmVille December 16, 2009

FarmVille is about RETENTION 28M Players Daily 80M Monthly

So how do we design games to have wide appeal and good retention?

Don’t Turn People Off
Pick themes & concepts people can relate to
The rules of how plants grow is common knowledge
No offending themes -- HARD

Build Social Value
Every time you play you build up a relationship
Replacement for having to go out of your way to keep in touch with someone

Visual Appeal Bright Graphics “ Moments of Joy”

Routine Updates and Events
Keeping your game updated is key to retaining users
No need to go complex, can be as simple as new items
Use metrics and feedback to drive product direction
Marketing is REQUIRED

We have our design, now how do we implement it?

A Bit on Code Architecture
Invest in data driven design and localization
Abstract away platform calls
Make it dead simple to use FB communication channels
Route traffic between your frontend and backend using a single point
Server (PHP) Authority on all game actions Handles all FB comm. Client (Flash) Generates “actions” to send back to server This traffic needs to be verified and reliable Plow/Plant/Etc. Updated Game State Server (PHP) Authority on all game actions Handles all FB comm.

Client Performance Long load times and sluggish framerate KILL retention Get something visible as soon as possible Stream in content, block on load for ONLY what’s needed (HUD/User Data) Adapt rendering to framerate

Server Scaling The Cloud – Autoscale! Everything is Async & Cached Parallelize all parts of architecture DB is redundant datastore only

Caching
Game should be able to run without FB api or your DB available
Profile canvas page loads – Reduce REST & DB calls to 0
One trick: Iframe that precaches FQL calls as game canvas page loads

We’re hiring! zynga.com/jobs Email: amahajan@zynga.com

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Building Big Social Games

by Amitt Mahajan on Dec 18, 2009

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