Game development is challenging due to many front-end platforms and issues with sessions not scaling. Long polling and socket programming are alternatives to sessions, but require protocol and database considerations. Open-source alternatives like Reddwarf Server exist, but writing your own server is not recommended. SmartFox Server provides listener-based APIs and client libraries but does not scale and is expensive. Social game companies like Zynga and King use various stacks including Rails, Redis, Erlang and AWS. NoSQL databases like Redis and Riak can be better alternatives than relational databases for games.

1. Server Side
Game Development
is hard!

2. Too many front end platforms
-ios
-android
-browsers
-flash

3. Session is evil
-Can not scale

4. Long polling
-Socket programming
-Protocols
-Ups!

5. Database?
-Read/Write is small
-Not a good idea to use MySQL+Memcache
-NoSQL shines

6. Write your own server?
Not a good idea

7. Open Source alternatives
-Reddwarf Server (Project Darkstar)

9. Buy a good one?
-Smartfox Server
http://www.smartfoxserver.com/

10. Smartfox Server
The good
-Less code via listener based API
-Client API’s, no need for socket programming
-Stable
-Out of the box HTTP tunneling

11. Smartfox Server
The bad
-2500 Euro / server / year
-Not a Free Software

12. Smartfox Server
The Ugly
- Does not scale!

13. What others do?
Social Game
-Zynga
-King.com
-Wooga
MMO’s
-EA Games
-Blizzard

14. Wooga Open Source
- https://github.com/wooga Wooga Github
- Pocket Island - HTML5 game (Ruby, NodeJS)
https://github.com/wooga/Pocket-Island
- Lots of Ruby-Erlang-Redis-JS stuff
- Wooga SlideShare
http://www.slideshare.net/wooga

15. NoSQL is your friend
-Redis
-Memcache
-MongoDB
-Hazelcast
-CouchDB
-Riak
-Cassandra

16. Wooga
-Diamond Dash (4.6M DAU)
-Monster World
-Bubble Island
-Brain Buddies (LAMP)

17. LAMP
-Brain Buddies, Bubble Island
-Nginx instead of Apache
-MySQL is fast enough

18. Rails World
Monster World
- Started with Rails - MySQL
-Not so useful, Farming games are not arcade
games
-Switched to Redis, now it rocks!
Happy Hospital
-Rails - Redis cluster
-Fast enough but Redis is not RDB
-Redis problems as main DB

19. Magic Land
- No DB is faster than no DB
- S3, Erlang
- Erlang Workers, S3 used for records
- Stateful development is complex
- Open sourced most of the erlang stuff used
for this game in github
StateFul

20. Rails Again
Pearls Peril
- Rails, Redis (High score, Metadata, etc), Riak
(All other stuff)

21. Problems
Software is easy, data is hard
-Redis
No backup, No slave
-AWS
Fast to create instance, it fails sometimes, Slow
IO on EBS
-JRuby
Helps a lot as Concurrency libraries are great
for threading in Java World

22. Alternatives
Write your own server
- NodeJS
- Java NIO, Akka, Netty
- Erlang, Scala

23. Questions?