EvilTrout

http://www.kongregate.com/games/EvilTrout/information-overlo...

Web apps aren't going anywhere any time soon. Do you really want to install a Ticketmaster app and wait while it downloads just to buy tickets for one show?

We were paying $800 a month for two high end servers at LayeredTech in Texas to handle our rails site (about 2M pageviews/day) We then bought two supermicro barebones servers and set up at a local co-location facility in Toronto.

The upfront cost of buying the servers (which were better than the ones we were renting) was $3500, but our monthly fees are now just $160. It didn't take long to pay for the server cost, and we'll have them around for as long as the hardware lasts (I expect it to be a while!).

Our game is a parody, and our main focus is on creating a universe that is funny and engaging. It would simply be bad game design if we didn't recognize that grinding is part of the MMORPG experience.

You obivously know this because you used the word "reducing" when referring to it.

If you want people to sink hundreds of hours into a game, the gameplay is going to include a LOT of repetition. The tricky part is to keep it fun and engaging despite this.

I created an entire app in less than two days that has consumable in app purchases. It has a RoR server component as well as the iPhone component and supports the asynchronous callbacks and such. Maybe it was easier for me because my background is in server side programming?

During one month where our sales were particularaly high they froze our account too, but not for incoming transactions, so no money was lost.

I called them on the phone and was able to speak to a representative in 5 minutes who sorted it out. Not exactly a horror story.

I've also used it in Montreal with similar experiences. So either the Canadian 3G networks are especially good, or AT&T's network is crap.

Why would anyone consider a backup on the same VM a backup at all?

All your data should be kept in two places, hopefully geographically disparate in case there's a building fire or horrible storm or what not.

You should also test it on a regular basis to make sure it exists (and so you know what to do when the shit hits the fan)

Ruby might be slow, but in my experience as long as you give it a lot of RAM to play with it can give you great performance (we have over 200k registered players). Of course, we also cache data heavily using memcached.

It's curious that the author uses TCP. Almost every high performance game uses UDP, as you don't care about lost packets or the order 99% of the time. You just want the latest information.

One reason might be to use Flash for the front end. It does not allow UDP sockets at this time.

Sorry, what? How could one possibly know there are more hacks in the Rails community than in the Django community?

I'm all for comparing the merits of various languages and frameworks, but this article is more about gut feelings than facts.

I think the indie game scene in particular, which often releases their titles for free, can benefit tremendously from having these tools available.

We have learned time and time again that you shouldn't trust your data to one service, so easy exporting of your documents is a great feature, and should be done on a regular basis!

Ruby has a memory issue with long running processes. They seem to grow and grow and need to be restarted when they get out of hand. People commonly use Monit or God for this.

When you use Passenger, you can have it restart your processes after a certain amount of requests to prevent the memory leak issue, but when it happens it seems to block all requests to all processes for a short time, which is annoying to end users. It means your site can be speedy and zip along, then just pause.

To be honest, my gut reaction was initially "there's no way this game has 40k active users", but then I clicked the online tab and sure enough there were that many people listed in the last 24 hours. Colour me impressed.

Monit may be harder to set up, but it works very well once it's running.

Our 1.9 deployment is Nginx -> HaProxy -> Thin

I had trouble getting Mongrel to work in 1.9 (it was my favorite in 1.8) although apparently you can do it. Thin just worked(tm) so I switched to it painlessly.

It's finally time to start developing entirely in Ruby 1.9 guys. Trust me.

I learned exactly the opposite from my startup. I was met with blank stare after blank stare as I explained my idea over and over.

As it turns out, if you are going after a non-mainstream market as I was (Internet culture), you're going to get this reaction a lot.

Okay, so my startup isn't huge. But it pays for itself and my modest salary. It's been 3 years now!