Show HN: spaceuncharted.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: spaceuncharted.com

9 pointswizzo4 comments

I was tired of games like Mafia Wars and wanted a phone-based MMO Strategy game where hundreds of players could actually engage each other on a 2D map, so I made one.

I track the state of the game each night so we can display a visual timeline of territory controlled by each alliance. (example: http://bit.ly/q5CFhU) I use jQuery mobile for the front end so it runs on most phones (via Phonegap) as well as modern web browsers. The server side is handled by Java Servlets and MySQL.

This started as a hobby - I'm not a developer by training - so I am very interested in feedback, suggestions, and ideas for improvements.

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This caught my eye because I'm a lurker here on Hacker News who actually plays this game! I'm super excited you are posting here because I really want to learn more about your server architecture. Can you provide more info on your java stack as well as the kind of hardware is running the site? Previous games had 300+ users, so scalability shouldn't be an issue yet, but have you planned for that?

Once criticism: For the time I've been playing, the game has been evolving rather quickly, and new features seem to have taken precedence over client stability.

We've actually taken a pretty homebrew approach and aren't using any external frameworks - just Tomcat and MySQL. On the hardware side we're using Linode shared servers so that we can quickly and easily scale up or down as needed. The game code is pretty efficient - we've run tests with thousands of players and had no problems, on modest hardware, so we're looking forward to growing quickly!

It's true that we've had some stability issues at times, but we're trying to cover a lot of platforms (Android, iOS, webOS, web) and add a lot of new features to improve the game. Now that we've officially launched (on 10/1) stability will definitely our #1 priority, though.

Interesting - since this started as a hobby, any thoughts on open sourcing the client or server code or documenting the client/server communication so the community could build clients? I figure folks would be able to pretty easily reverse engineer it with the web client now, anyways.

I'm a bit late to the party but this looks like an interesting way to release a mobile game.

Would you be interested in chatting over email? We'd love to throw you support from PostageApp. :) Let me know!

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