Extending the Game to the Web

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Extending the Game to the Web

• Aaron Lieberman

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The Web

• Website as a feature area
• Why is it interesting?
• Implementation
• Results

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Bungie.Net

• Company website
• Represents Bungie
• Games are one tier off the front page
• Community
• News

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Demo of Bungie.Net Integration

• Home page
• Personal stats page
• Games listing
• Detailed game information
• Game viewer

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Why the web?
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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 didnt really pertain to us, they
could be helpful if you need some convincing
reasons to put time into web features
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Online Strategy Guide

• Dynamic, up to date
• Intermediate players
• Easy to understand
• Learning curve
• Historic data

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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

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How do we use these differences?

• Tables of statistics
• Lots of text, images and data
• High resolution images
• Point-and-click navigation
• Inline hyperlinks

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How did we do it?
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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
• Scrapped our old Perl site
• New site in ASP.NET
• Heavily relying on SQL and Web Services
• Designed to work across multiple servers

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Dreams

• Record games played online
• View recent games
• Analyze how people play
• Send via email or IM
• Visual representation

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Storage Concerns

• Storage size
• Number of games
• SQL experience compared to our SQL requirements
• Getting data from the game to the site

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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

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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

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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

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Basic Server Architecture
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Accomplishments
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Features

• Detailed statistics
• Game Viewer
• Emblems
• RSS
• Feature revision / updates
• Processing system

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Processing

• Peak processing at 30 games per second
• 343 million games stored
• 2 weeks till partial purge
• 750 GB of online storage

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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)
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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

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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