Panels and appointments at the Game Developers Conference are loaded with all kinds of information about video games. Some of it's social, some of it's technical, and a whole lot of it can go over the average gamer's head. GamePro breaks some of it down for you here.
AJ Glasser at Rapidly Developing FARMVILLE: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks:
This was a more technical panel, focusing on data storage and redundant server strategies. Even so, I think I've got a good grip on how Zynga conquered Facebook with a golden strategy: don't trust Facebook.
Zynga knew early on that they had to have total redundancy on their data-storage so random server outages on Facebook's end wouldn't hurt them.
"If [players] lose their data, that's like a shelf moment for them," Lead Designer Amitt Mahajan said. "They're not going to play your game anymore."
Sounds to me like Zynga pulled this off by relying on cloud-based gaming instead of having dedicated servers. As Farmville grows, however -- recently passing the 32 million daily user mark -- the developer is increasingly dependent on Facebook. To stay ahead of Terms of Service changes and stuff like server outages, the company is getting creative about data storage and Farmville's editable XML code.
"Eventually we're going to have to shift off of [XML]," Mahajan said, "because we're going to have way too many items."
For now, though, Farmville's riding high on the speed train to putting out Farmville and keeping it running.
