July 17, 2009 at 10:36Godville One year after the habra effect
Exactly a year ago, two young and naive comrades, in a desperate attempt to at least somewhere to build kilograms in vain written and useless code, posted a link to "Godville - the city of gods and heroes" on the famous resource Habrahabr. The timid hope of being noticed and attracting at least two to three dozen users “for experiments” in a dying project suddenly came true more than justifiably. Having carried out a post on the main page and desperately trying to register, the grateful habrasociety in passing almost tumbled down the green then server. The next day, the registration had to be closed, but over the past day the number of gods on the cloud increased by two orders of magnitude ...
The next week was sleepless for us. The code was written and optimized in huge chunks; in a matter of hours, fresh and very noticeable features were screwed onto the hero's almost bare page initially. On the third day, it was finally decided to put the players' counter online, and when he showed the first digit, his code was cross-checked for a long time - the people were hanging in clusters. An extremely successful idea was the opening of the “lower box” - a special form for quickly sending feedback directly from the main game page. The popularity of this thing is such that in the coming years to realize all the ideas sent to us does not shine.
Having quickly optimized the bottlenecks, but in principle, not ready for serious loads, the core of the game had to be completely rewritten, which was spent a considerable part of the fall. From the simplest single-level solution such as “vinaigrette”, a transition was made to the multi-level system “complex lunch”, the most obvious and simple solution in which was to separate the user interface from the simulator of the game world. The system is still being optimized and patched; as the load grows, problematic components change and rewrite, so the whole resource is still able to spin on a single budget server most of the time .
An attempt to support an initially completely free project with a donation system almost failed - for many months it was not possible to recoup even the aforementioned penny server. As a result, in March of this year, the project was still monetized , which predictably stirred up the masses, but at least somehow covered the monthly expenses in the form of hosting and other things.
In addition to the excellent start, which gave us the only post on the hub, we are extremely grateful to this resource for the "high-quality user." The first portion of players from among the not-so-stupid people in Runet has largely shaped the mood and set a certain level of quality for the content of the project - so far, despite the long-open registration and periodic influxes of dubious masses, it has been possible to maintain the inner world (from the text of the game to the forum) in fair condition.
What do we have today? A game project in the original genre, written in your free time, fairly overgrown with pleasant functionality, at the stage of conditional payback and without any advertising attracting a substantial number of people. Judging by the reviews, many people enjoy the game very much. Further plans, in addition to mandatory world domination, include the consistent implementation of a multi-page pile of new ideas.
Thanks for attention. The next post is in 2010.
The next week was sleepless for us. The code was written and optimized in huge chunks; in a matter of hours, fresh and very noticeable features were screwed onto the hero's almost bare page initially. On the third day, it was finally decided to put the players' counter online, and when he showed the first digit, his code was cross-checked for a long time - the people were hanging in clusters. An extremely successful idea was the opening of the “lower box” - a special form for quickly sending feedback directly from the main game page. The popularity of this thing is such that in the coming years to realize all the ideas sent to us does not shine.
Having quickly optimized the bottlenecks, but in principle, not ready for serious loads, the core of the game had to be completely rewritten, which was spent a considerable part of the fall. From the simplest single-level solution such as “vinaigrette”, a transition was made to the multi-level system “complex lunch”, the most obvious and simple solution in which was to separate the user interface from the simulator of the game world. The system is still being optimized and patched; as the load grows, problematic components change and rewrite, so the whole resource is still able to spin on a single budget server most of the time .
An attempt to support an initially completely free project with a donation system almost failed - for many months it was not possible to recoup even the aforementioned penny server. As a result, in March of this year, the project was still monetized , which predictably stirred up the masses, but at least somehow covered the monthly expenses in the form of hosting and other things.
In addition to the excellent start, which gave us the only post on the hub, we are extremely grateful to this resource for the "high-quality user." The first portion of players from among the not-so-stupid people in Runet has largely shaped the mood and set a certain level of quality for the content of the project - so far, despite the long-open registration and periodic influxes of dubious masses, it has been possible to maintain the inner world (from the text of the game to the forum) in fair condition.
What do we have today? A game project in the original genre, written in your free time, fairly overgrown with pleasant functionality, at the stage of conditional payback and without any advertising attracting a substantial number of people. Judging by the reviews, many people enjoy the game very much. Further plans, in addition to mandatory world domination, include the consistent implementation of a multi-page pile of new ideas.
Thanks for attention. The next post is in 2010.