#funzio

Crime City – Funzio, Inc

Crime City Funzio, Inc Genre: Games Release Date: August 10, 2011 *****#1 free game in 26 countries and counting *****#1 free app in 10 countries and counting Indulge your inner criminal mastermind in Crime City, brought to you by GREE—makers of hit games like Modern War! Breaking the rules is way more fun than playing by them! Build your criminal empire, one job at a time! Hit the streets, flex…

Modern War – Funzio, Inc

Modern War Funzio, Inc Genre: Games Release Date: November 30, 2011 THE FIRST-EVER GRAPHIC MILITARY GAME World Domination is now within your grasp! Join a faction and join the fight in Modern War, thepopular combat game where you faceoff against enemies for control of country after country,until you rule ‘em all. Taking over the world isn’t for the weak. Build strength in numbers by teaming up…

Hey, I was looking for people who want to join a guild!

I made a guild intended for female players, but relatively active players are welcome. 

The Amazon Warriors

635-249-188

Requirement: Relatively active

If your looking for allies I except any requests

//PROJECT RELAY

After all the trouble we went through by using Flume, we realized that Flume did not satisfy our requirements. So we decided to build an in house alternative which did not require all the bells and whistles. This also meant that it would be simpler to implement. It would be super simple, easy to maintain and configure with a few parameters... all the good stuff that every engineering project wants to have. So was it as simple, easy to maintain etc as we originally wanted it to be? ... erm, maybe. We went through many iterations before we finally stabilized into a design which we were satisfied with.

Our initial design looked something like this:

We decided to pick NodeJS as a language to implement it in as it had inherent advantages in handling concurrent network requests. Our app server connected to the service which accepted tcp connection. It sends the data over the connection and once its done sending over, close the connection. Our service consisted of a bunch of "collectors" which accepted data from any app server that connected to it. It would initially log all the incoming data into a file and post process it at periodic intervals to copy over the data into vertica. This design meant that the game code was responsible for handling all failure cases like one of the collectors being down, the connection being too slow etc. In a full failure scenario when all the collectors were down, the app server would simply log the unsent data to a file locally which was then later copied into vertica by our existing daily batch import job.

In about a week, we developed it and shipped it to production for a couple of our low traffic games. I then named it Relay since it was all about message passing from one server to another. Cool name eh?

Over the next week we debugged it, handled all the bugs and once it was sufficiently stable, started rolling it out to the other games. We had rolled it out to all the games, and the system scaled beautifully... until it broke down as we rolled it out to the last game.

//DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

One of the best decisions we made was to make the game code fell back to the old behavior in case Relay failed. And it worked wonderfully, we never lost a single bit of data when we were making a transition. The data might have come in a bit late (batch imported once a day), but it would eventually be available.

The way we rolled out the code was to low traffic games first and then the higher traffic games which had more data. We also had knobs which would control what set of events were sent through relay, flume or daily import job. Our aim was to make ALL the traffic go through Relay eventually. And we started by just pumping as much as we can through Relay to see where it breaks.

So what happened when we rolled it out to the last game? The collector part of the process slowed down to a crawl because of the amount of data coming in. It simply couldn't keep up with processing the incoming stream.

The collector had two parts:

The listener handled the incoming tcp connection, accepted the data and logged it immediately to a file. This file was processed at regular intervals and then copied into vertica. Keep in mind that both parts were part of a single process.

The bottleneck was the second half of the collector. When it started to process the next file, the process would go into this massive slowdown and stop accepting tcp connections until it finished processing the file. It took quite a while to figure out why it was slowing down so much, it turned that the garbage collector hogged all the processing while deallocating and reallocating memory. Even though NodeJS is asynchronous, it is still a single process i.e. it can only execute one thread at a time. So if any one thing is executing, nothing else executes in parallel .. but anytime any thread is waiting for I/O nodejs goes off and handles something else giving it incredible speed and scalalbilty for applications which are continuously waiting for some I/O or are event based.

NodeJS also does not have a clean way to iterate through a file line by line. So what I did was just load the entire thing in memory and then process it. That was also (obviously) causing the process to be memory intensive. We fixed it later by using the 'lazy' module which helps in making processing things sequentially without all the crazy hoops that NodeJS really requires you to do.

Once we verified that the second part was causing the problem, it took me about 15 mins to split them up into two distinct nodejs processes and deploy them out separately. To do this fast, all I did was make two programs with one having the "copying to vertica" part disabled and vice versa. The code was still exactly the same and it allowed us to test it out really quickly.

So the new Relay setup looked:

//DECOUPLING

This setup almost satisfied what we wanted, but not quite. We also wanted graceful handling of failures of various components of the system. This meant that if any collectors, copiers or the app server failing should not cause any effect on other parts of the system. With the current setup, if the collectors went down, the game would start throwing a lot of internal errors when its unable to connect to a collector (it would not affect the game itself but would lead to a slowdown in the performance). This was still unacceptable because we wanted to completely decouple the application code from analytics.

After working on it a little bit more we got the final design as shown:

In the new setup the app server would simply log to a file locally in a particular format. We introduced a relay sender on each app server which is continuously running. It picked up the logged data and sent it it to the collector. This allowed completely decoupling of the analytics systems and really helps us in maintaining it without touching the game code at all. Further, each module - sender, listener and copier are completely separate entities and so they can be used/maintained/upgraded/swapped in and out independently.

Once we had this design, we realized that we can use the individual components separately in other parts of the system which had similar needs. These new usecases also prodded us to redesign relay to be much more configurable and generic.

We think that other people may also find this system useful, and as part of our open source initiative, we have open sourced Relay here. It has the generic parts of sender and listener and they can be used independently. They are also configurable via just a few command line params.

New Post has been published on http://projectopenhand.biz/former-funzio-execs-google-pm-launch-wormhole-games-2/781

Former Funzio Execs, Google PM Launch Wormhole Games

A former Funzio executive and a former Google product manager are trying their hands at the mobile gaming world again. Jamil Moledina, who was a vice president of business development at Funzio, and led EA’s publishing efforts, has partnered with ex-Googler James Kelm to start Wormhole Games.

They expect to launch their first title in the second quarter of this year. While they aren’t giving a sneak preview of the game, expect it to also be in the midcore segment that Funzio targeted.

“We’ve put a lot of thought into genres that have many years of success that have been underrepresented on mobile app platforms,” Kelm said, who pointed to examples like NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing, which has been one of the best-known racing games on iOS.

Kelm was previously a senior worldwide product planner at Apple for the iBook, and then became a product manager at Google working on mobile advertising, commerce and payments. He later joined Funzio, which was acquired by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $ 210 million.

Moledina said he knew he wanted to go back into gaming after leaving Funzio. He’s served on the board of the International Game Developers Association and was a director of business development for EA Partners, part of the company’s publishing efforts.

“This industry is my passion,” he said. “I’ve had a great deal of traction in it and it would be a waste to leave it unexplored.”

Wormhole currently has six full-time employees, including a founding engineer from LOLapps and a designer from Zynga. The company has raised a “friends and family” round.

Even though Moledina was an entrepreneur in residence at Signia Ventures, the financing vehicle led by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, he says he hasn’t taken funding from Thompson (who backed Funzio).

New Post has been published on http://projectopenhand.biz/former-funzio-execs-google-pm-launch-wormhole-games/748

Former Funzio Execs, Google PM Launch Wormhole Games

A former Funzio executive and a former Google product manager are trying their hands at the mobile gaming world again. Jamil Moledina, who was a vice president of business development at Funzio, and led EA’s publishing efforts, has partnered with ex-Googler James Kelm to start Wormhole Games.

They expect to launch their first title in the second quarter of this year. While they aren’t giving a sneak preview of the game, expect it to also be in the midcore segment that Funzio targeted.

“We’ve put a lot of thought into genres that have many years of success that have been underrepresented on mobile app platforms,” Kelm said, who pointed to examples like NaturalMotion’s CSR Racing, which has been one of the best-known racing games on iOS.

Kelm was previously a senior worldwide product planner at Apple for the iBook, and then became a product manager at Google working on mobile advertising, commerce and payments. He later joined Funzio, which was acquired by Japanese gaming giant GREE for $ 210 million.

Moledina said he knew he wanted to go back into gaming after leaving Funzio. He’s served on the board of the International Game Developers Association and was a director of business development for EA Partners, part of the company’s publishing efforts.

“This industry is my passion,” he said. “I’ve had a great deal of traction in it and it would be a waste to leave it unexplored.”

Wormhole currently has six full-time employees, including a founding engineer from LOLapps and a designer from Zynga. The company has raised a “friends and family” round.

Even though Moledina was an entrepreneur in residence at Signia Ventures, the financing vehicle led by Playdom co-founder Rick Thompson, he says he hasn’t taken funding from Thompson (who backed Funzio).

//INTERNS! ZOMG!

About a month and half after I joined, Ram announced that the engineering team is getting interns. Four of 'em. They were all undergrads from University of Waterloo and were coming here for a semester as part of their co op program. This was the first time engineering was getting interns in the company. Ram walks over to me and tells me that I was gonna mentor 2 interns. *GULP* Here I was a fresh grad couple of months into his first job and I am supposed to mentor two other people?! This was a big responsibility to say the least. These interns were gonna have their first taste of industry through me. *Double GULP* All sort of doubts and nervousness hit me for the next few hours. With these thoughts going on in my head I started training the interns.

It turned out that Waterloo has an excellent co-op program. So the students in the program study for one semester and work in the industry for the next sem. This meant that they gain a lot of industry experience by the time they graduate. The interns I got, Matt and Patrick had already interned at a couple of other companies before they joined Funzio. So (thankfully) I wasn't the first guy who was mentoring them.

Waterloo students are incredibly smart and are also very fast learners. Both Patrick and Matt quickly picked up the basics of our processes and were comfortable with our code base in a week or so. When I had joined Funzio, my first piece of code was out on production within 2 days. That experience had given me an incredible feeling of doing something substantial, however small, and also a good amount of confidence. It instantly made me feel part of the team. I have been doing the same for every new hire (full time or intern) since then.

They quickly went from doing bug fixes to building full fledged tools and features. Of course there were a few hiccups along the way and I had to teach them about best practices about coding style, scalibility, networks and databases but once they got the concept they applied it everywhere. They were incredibly inquisitive and were always hungry to learn more. Seeing them grow from slightly nervous students to confident software engineers was the best thing ever. Matt had moved onto the iOS team and Patrick stayed on to help me with analytics. We built and improved various tools that have since become critical to the functioning of Funzio as a company.