Using PlayerIO to Scale Your Online Multiplayer Game, Part 2

Oliver from PlayerIO talks about their service for developers, part 2

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/playerio-part2-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Oliver: Hey, again.

Interviewer: Hey, what’s up? OK, so this will be the second half of the interview. So, in the first half you discussed why your service is different and potentially more compelling than some of the other, you know, product type things, like SmartFox or Electro-Server, mainly because you’re offering a service.

So, what I wanted to discuss is, you know, what kind of potentially interesting games or game designs can people do with your service? Are there any interesting game designs that you’ve seen for your service?

Oliver: The whole thing about it being a service is really key to us. We keep telling ourselves we just want people to be able to just get straight to the game play and not have to worry about the infrastructure. So, normally with other relative solutions you have to worry about hardware and which machine you’re going to run it on and those other things. For us it should just be a decision. I want to build a game. Then, you have the tools to start building it, and you can just deploy it straight away. That’s really what we think is the appeal of it.

In terms of potentially interesting games and game designs, we sort of had, when we started out, when we said we were going to extract it from Nonoba we were going to make it a service for itself. We sort of looked around and said, ‘What are the use cases for this?’ and we sort of said, ‘Well, Facebook games is one that we want to support’. We also want to support MMOs, the browser-based MMOs, because we think they’re also an interesting type thing that’s happening. That includes all the virtual worlds, stuff like Penguin, these type of sites. And so, the third leg that we have everything that is interesting is campaign games for micro sites and these sources of advertising and things.

Interviewer: So, you’re saying using MMOs or multiplayer games is a way to advertise sites.

Oliver: No, no, no. I was just saying, there are three use cases that we look at when we consider features: Facebook and those type of social games and then MMOs and virtual worlds and then sort of campaign games, stuff that has a short lifetime but might become bigger fast.

Interviewer: OK.

Oliver: And that’s also the case where usually the guys that are running that are not very technical. They just want to know that they can put their load on another system and make sure that it runs without having to think about it.

Interviewer: Do you have specific examples of each type and ways that people could potentially use your service, say, for social games or browser games or these campaign games?

Oliver: I have some games that I know about that are built right now that I can’t talk about.

Interviewer: That’s fine.

Oliver: But I can certainly say, for instance, there’s a bunch of the Facebook games where it’s really a sandbox type experience where you go in and you sort of play in your sandbox and you build your sandbox bigger and better. And then once in a while, you go to other sandboxes and see what they’re doing. They’re variations of these themes. That’s definitely one of the use cases we thought a lot about in terms of the persistence thing that we’re building up. We also still have this thing called Quick Connect which really allows for very, very, very fast integration with Facebook and other user databases.

Interviewer: Yeah. Can you talk about Quick Connect some more and exactly what it is?

Oliver: Sure. So, Quick Connect is just–since one of the goals was we were not going to be a brand anymore in terms of users. We’re just going to be a brand in terms of developers and just have the underlying back end service. Then, we also said, well developers they usually have to interact with all of these other platforms on the other end, Facebook or open social or all the other ones. We built it as such that it’s very easy to connect PlayerIO, but then we said, there’s a couple ones that are really, really big that we want to support. Facebook comes to mind.

So, we built Quick Connect which right now is three integrations. It’s a Facebook integration that makes it really easy to use. Basically, if you’re building a Flash game and you want to have Facebook log-in, you just basically call in and then you’re connected to PlayerIO as indicated as a Facebook user.

So, that’s one. Congregate is another one that we did. And then the third one is sort of a special case where we’re saying lots of game developers just want to have a registration and a log-in system for themselves for their game. But maybe they’ll want to manage the whole databases and servers for that.

So, there’s basically just a registration system that just works for your game, or the users will be yours. You own them and you can later export them and put them into your own database and move around with them, do what you want with them. It’s nothing you couldn’t build yourself. It’s just very, very fast to get started with.

Interviewer: OK. Getting back to the game designs, have you looked at the mobile MMOs or mobile development? Does that even relate to being able to use your service?

Oliver: Yeah sure. I haven’t looked at the mobile MMOs specifically, but my partner, Chris wrote this game called Everyone Edits, and it’s basically you jump into a room and it’s like a 2D grid and everybody is smiling and they can move around like a Mario character basically that jumps and there’s gravity. But then, they can also put blocks everywhere on that grid. So, choose your block type and then press on the scene somewhere, and then a block will appear on their end. For the other users in the same game, they’ll see the same blocks.

That was just sort of an example, and people are doing really, really fun stuff in there, you know. Some people like to try to make intricate, nice looking castles and other ones want to be griefers and stuff. It’s quite fun to play with, but I don’t know.

Adobe has this CS5 Flash thing which will be able to export into iPhone. One of the examples that he showed me was–which I thought was really powerful–was he had the same game running on the iPhone. So, you had people playing online who were playing with basically him on the iPhone. And that was just taking the same game and editing it so it fits the different screen, and it worked with the accelerometer.

Interviewer: That’s awesome.

Oliver: And then it would work on the iPhone.

Interviewer: Yeah. Do you know any other examples, or have you guys experimented with any other potential games that could be developed on the iPhone that would be able to do Real Time multiplayer because your service allows that?

Oliver: No. We haven’t.

Interviewer: OK.

Chris: Hey, I’m Chris. I’m one of the developers who worked on the iPhone game. I just wanted to add a few things here.

Interviewer: Definitely.

Chris: So, while we built the API, we were talking to Adobe about their upcoming Beta and the kind of requirements that would be able to be a service like ours, to become compatible with something on the iPhone. So, we built from the start to make sure that everything we built was really compatible. So, when CS5 comes out, we will be able to build fully compatible iPhone games using the PlayerIO tool kits which means we got full Real Time multiplayer. You’ve got a foolproof persistent system. You’ve got everything [?] and all of the nice packaging as well.

The good thing about that is you can have a Real Time multiplayer game on your computer and on your phone and whatever else device that supports Flash.

Interviewer: Yeah. Go ahead.

Chris: We’ve been playing around with a lot of different game examples. Of course, you know the user interface on the phone is different. You know, you have an accelerometer and things like that but doing simple applications like a multiplayer Pictionary on an iPhone is a very powerful thing because you can grow with it, and soon you’ll be able to get you a simple interface that will be something that will be really immersive because you have a beautiful experience where you use the device while you’re actually playing with your friends.

Interviewer: OK.

Chris: That’s an example.

Interviewer: Definitely. The one issue though is when it’s Real Time, you know, your friends may not be online at that point. But I guess with your service it’s mainly focus. You would have to think about a design that works with Real Time to make the most of it.

Oliver: Yeah. As I said, it’s different silos.

Interviewer: Yeah definitely.

Oliver: On the multiplayer thing, you have to figure out how you want to match people, whether you want to match them with their friends or their friends from Facebook or if you just want to, say, play with somebody on your own level or do matching or whatever rules you want to build at. That’s on you. We just make sure that you can do it.

Interviewer: OK. Finally, I want to know since you’re in this space you’ve seen how this service can be used. Where do you see the future of these multiplayer Flash games going? And what do you think is going to be big next? Is it going to be Real Time multiplayer? Is asynchronous going to be bigger? I know you talk about different silos, but where do you feel all of this is going, and does Accent PP change a lot of the requirements then for actually having…

Oliver: So, is this one question or like a ton of questions? I can say this. I think that Flash will continue to be more powerful. From when we started out…

Interviewer: Is HTML 5 and all this other stuff replacing Flash? I mean, it might be just…

Oliver: Yeah, yeah. That might be true for other types of clumps of video or ads. I think Flash is really powerful at positioning games, and when we started off a couple of years ago games were at one level and they’re at a much higher level now. I think that will continue to be the case. I think people will build deeper and better experiences using–either they’re be asynchronous or they’ll be multiplayer live or something else entirely, but I think that Flash as a platform will continue to be big. That’s the only future prediction I want to make.

Interviewer: Definitely. OK. So, where can developers find out more about your site then?

Oliver: So, the URL is Player.IO.

Interviewer: OK.

Oliver: That’s a good starting point. There is a feature section that takes you to the current features, and then there’s, of course, documentation. There’s some examples and some stuff you can just try. If you download the developer package, it comes with four–I think it is–games that are prebuilt using different areas of the tool kit that you should just be able to download and you press a five and basically run. There’s also a forum that’s sort of active where you can ask questions. We’re very active in there and also a bunch of the other developers are answering questions often there.

Interviewer: Aside from the persistent API, is there anything else that you can announce at this point that’s going to be coming out soon?

Oliver: I don’t want to do that because I am worried that the [?] tend to shift around, and if I say that something is coming and people will say, you promised that. I can tell you that our focus is games, and we sort of have the use case we talked about, Facebook games and MMOs and campaign games. What we’re building is based on the feedback we’re getting from developers there. And that’s also deciding the order that we’re doing things in.

Interviewer: OK.

Oliver: Persistence is going to be big now. That’s what probably is going to be the next big one.

Interviewer: OK. Perfect. Great. We’re talking with Oliver and Chris from Player.IO. Thanks again for your time. Take care.

Oliver: Of course. Bye.

Interviewer: Bye.