Server Backstage of MMO Games

There are some sweet topics in high-tech which easily catching the attention of the general public. Just try to do a talk on some trendy AJAX framework and most people who are not in the web development won't be interested. Now try the same with SQL optimizations and you'll lose everybody who is not a back-end developer. Maybe some topic for starters? A lot of experienced people won't be interested. Tricky details of GC optimization for JVM? And only experts would come up. Seems like every talk has it's target audience.

But I've found that some topics will appeal to a wide audience no matter what. One of these magic topics is MMO game development. Whenever I mention my involvement in MMO world I always get a lot of interest. Even from people who have never worked in the game development. The topic is magnetic and everybody wants to get some insights on how MMO games are ticking.

Actually, you don't have to be deeply familiar with technology to understand the number of challenges MMO game developers are facing. There are thousands of players, huge traffic, latency, synchronization, load balancing and a lot of other issues – both technical and social. MMO games are enormous projects requiring a lot of people to be involved. And also money... A lot of money...

Sure thing that would be fascinating to everybody! Even for people who is not that much into technology. I had artists and game designers asking me how the dark server side is functioning.

This September I've been able to do a talk on server side of MMO games. A cool company Ciklum held GameDev Saturday in their Dnepropetrovsk office. It attracted a lot of people involved in game development – actually the best target audience for a talk on MMOG. Since not only developers were attending, I tried not to dive into technical details and keep it catchy for everyone.

I've covered basically the whole life cycle of a big MMO project from server-side perspective. I used my experience with Cities XL - it was one of the best projects I've participated in and I tried to reflect all the positive vibes on the audience.

Now the video of my talk is available here (the talk is in Russian) along with slides. There is also a photo album of the event.

Kudos to Tatyana Prudnikova and other Ciklum guys and girls for the effort in organizing the event. It was remarkable experience in the remarkable city on the Dnepr river :)