Transcript Extending the Game to the Web

Extending the Game to the
Web
Aaron Lieberman
The Web
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Website as a feature area
Why is it interesting?
Implementation
Results
Bungie.Net
• Company website
– Represents Bungie
– Games are one tier off the front page
• Community
• News
Demo of Bungie.Net Integration
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Home page
Personal stats page
Games listing
Detailed game
information
• Game viewer
Why the web?
Our Reasons
• Our main reasons
– Community
– Continued excitement
about the game
– Reach people when
they are away from
their couch
– Educating players how
to improve their game
– User interface
differences
• Other reasons
– Further excitement
about your brand
– “Back of the box”
– Ad revenue
Although these didn’t really pertain to
us, they could be helpful if you need
some convincing reasons to put time
into web features
Online Strategy Guide
• Dynamic, up to date
• Intermediate players
– Easy to understand
– Learning curve
• Historic data
Interface Differences
Console vs. Computer
(or Gamepad/TV vs. Keyboard/Mouse/Monitor)
• The good
– Gamepad
Taking actions,
Indicating direction
Navigating hierarchical
menus
– Display
Movement and action
More comfortable for
longer use
• The bad
– Gamepad
Horrible for text entry
Mouse is superior for
using menus
– Display
Consoles have
relatively low resolution
displays
Bad for reading text
How do we use these
differences?
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Tables of statistics
Lots of text, images and data
High resolution images
Point-and-click navigation
Inline hyperlinks
How did we do it?
History
• By about a year before Halo 2 launch we had
developed several pieces of technology
– Detailed statistics in game
– Code to upload http posts from game to website and
process the uploads efficiently
• Had recently built a new website
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Scrapped our old Perl site
New site in ASP.NET
Heavily relying on SQL and Web Services
Designed to work across multiple servers
Dreams
• Record games played online
• View recent games
– Analyze how people play
– Send via email or IM
• Visual representation
Storage Concerns
• Storage size
• Number of games
• SQL experience compared to our SQL
requirements
• Getting data from the game to the site
In-game Functionality
• Low impact on the game
• Gameplay not impacted if the backend
goes down
– Experience running a 24/7 system
– Being on-call
– Eventually stop support?
• Push work out later in development cycle
As late as possible
• Web deliverables came come late
• Some work needs to be done before the
game ships
– In game features
– Uploading / downloading
– User Interface
– Testing
Tools and Technologies
• Development
– Visual Studio 2003
– C# / .NET Framework 1.1
– ASP.NET 1.1 and Web Services
• Server-side
– Windows Server 2003
– SQL Server 2000
Basic Server Architecture
Accomplishments
Features
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Detailed statistics
Game Viewer
Emblems
RSS
Feature revision / updates
Processing system
Processing
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Peak processing at 30+ games per second
343 million games stored
2 weeks till partial purge
750 GB of online storage
Cheaters
• What constitutes cheating?*
– Boosting
– Standbying
– Modding
• Xbox Live provides help
– Executable code safety
• Detection
– Compare historical ranking data
– Look for anomalies in games (things that are
disallowed in the game world)
– Evaluate game-specific data in uploads
– Detect modified content
(* not a comprehensive list)
A Handful of
Stats
(compiled 1 year after launch)
• Number of online players: 2.56 million
• Average of 1 million games per day
• Man-hours of Optimatch games:
218,668,172
Main points
• Web integration can be considered a
feature
• Takes lots of work, from people with
diverse skill sets
• New direction to innovate
• Keeps people coming back and excited for
a long time