Hello PokéForce!
Now that our Spring Demo has finished up, it's a great time for the team to reflect on what went well, what could be improved, where we went wrong, and we'd like to share some of that insight with you. That was an incredible two weeks that had so many high points, so many new memories created, and we welcomed so many new faces as well! It was a chaotic time for our entire staff team, with our community support & moderation teams rising to the challenge, and for our development teams who watched their hard work over the last few months get put to the test. We've also broken records, established new ones, and shone some light onto what needs to be changed for our next iteration of PokéForce. Without further ado, let's go over what we learned, and congratulate everyone who participated in this Demo, whether you were a player, or a staff member!
This proved to have a trickle down effect where battles finishing and being transmitted to the game server to process (i.e, update your Pokemon's health, trigger plugins on gym trainers/leaders, etc) would cause other bugs to happen. This was especially frustrating in our first couple of days while we tried to track down what was causing these servers to disagree with each other. It wasn't quite so clear at first, so we were throwing everything we could at the wall to see what we could do, and eventually we found the core issue. It wasn't a perfect solution but put the servers into a stable state so that we weren't closing battle rooms prematurely, which was another point of frustration.
However, this Demo was massive in helping us figure out the core problem, something that would have been impossible to find in our Beta Programme, and for that we are eternally grateful. Sometimes there are just things you cannot find until you have hundreds of people tackling it from different angles. We are now working on a solution where data transmission is taken out of the equation, and we use a messaging broker (RabbitMQ, to be exact) to ensure that messages between the two servers aren't out of order, and no longer need to talk to each other directly, which will prove to be more robust in the future.
As for the game-server, we faced another issue directly linked to the previous issue, where someones save file grew in size.. to a whopping 500mb! Whenever this poor soul would login to the server, it would deadlock one of our threads and crash the rest of the server. We legitimately zip-bombed our own server, hah! Once we sorted that particular issue (solved by simply not saving defeated gym trainers as a List, but rather as a Set), the game-server went back to it's stable self, and the rest of the Demo went on without a hitch.
However, the entire process of needing to put out fires with random bugs like these, taught us that using something like Java for our back-end servers wasn't sustainable, and we're going back to the drawing board with our core. @Triston, @Benoon, and I have decided that for future-proofing our growth and stability, we're going to do our servers in Rust. This is an exciting development for us, and we'll have more information to share on that change in the near-future.
Now for some numbers! I mentioned previously that we broke records, and I'd like to give more information on some other various fun facts!
First up is our peak online count, on our first hour of being live, our top online count was 1,100 people (give or take a few 10s there), which broke our record of 700 online in our Summer Demo. That's truly incredible and keeps speaking to how much we're growing as a niche Pokémon MMORPG. Understandably people were frustrated with the less-than-ideal launch, and we ended up stabilizing at around 200-300 people online concurrently after the first couple of days.
As for the total amount of unique accounts that played, that number hit 7,988, which is an approximate jump of about 1,000 unique accounts.
Of all players that logged in, 90% of you managed to complete the tutorial and choose your starter Pokémon, fantastic!
Of all players only 251 managed to conquer the Community Support challenge, earning themselves the 'Community Conqueror Badge' on their trainer cards.
There was quite a bit more interest in the Petal Cloak however, being obtained by almost 1,700 players! This was quite a bit rarer than what we saw in our previous demo, which leads us to believe that many people didn't see the challenge through due to encountering bugs in the battle engine, which is absolutely reasonable, and is a point we need to be addressing in the future.
The rarest Pokémon was Seedot, which was obtained by only a single player, followed closely by Scyther which was obtained by two players.
The most common starter choice was Cyndaquil, being picked by almost 2,900 players, followed by Totodile which was chosen by around 2,000 players. Magnemite shockingly comes in third, sparking the hearts of approximately 1,300 players. Chikorita was chosen by a bit more than 600 players, but surprisingly only two players leveled Chikorita high enough to fully evolve it into a Meganium. Mankey was picked by around 500 players, and Doduo was left in their cage, being chosen by only 300 players.
Of all the players who undertook the gym challenge, 82.4% of them were successful in defeating all three gym leaders! The remaining 12.6% defeated only a single gym leader, and 4.9% defeated two gym leaders.
Absolutely amazing!
While we're calling this Demo a massive success in the grand scheme of things, we're committed to getting back to the drawing board to improve various aspects of the game, and we want to thank everyone who persevered through the issues, and for helping us shine some light on what needs work, and where.
We mentioned previously that we are no longer offering exclusive cosmetics for Demos, and I want to get into that a little bit, as I'm sure people will be wondering why. In the future, we are no longer going to be announcing Demo dates and building towards them, instead we're going to move into a more agile development curve, and releasing what we'll be calling "Snapshots" of the game. What this will mean is when we feel the game is stable, and there's new things to test or try, we'll drop the Snapshot and invite people to play. This also means we'll be saving player progress between each Snapshot (barring anything that requires a hard reset), leading up to a launch (where progress will be reset for a final time, and we'll launch for real!), which will help us, in addition to the Beta Programme, to make sure that everything is snug and ready for a real release. Any account that participates in these Snapshots will also be awarded a badge that signifies that you were here for this drive towards launch, and we'll be looking into other potential rewards such as a founders pack on launch, but more on that later.
Another point of contention that we want to address before Launch is access to a Mobile (Android) client, and it's something we're going to hone in on while we rebuild our cores. I'm happy to announce that supporting Mobile will be top priority for the next Snapshot, so phone users rejoice!
All in all, once again a Demo has inspired the team to continue working on the game, knowing that we have such an amazing community behind us, and we're excited to keep working towards delivering what we hope is one of the best Pokémon MMORPGs ever! Thank you all so much for being with us through thick and thin, and we'll be sharing more progress updates soon, so stay tuned!
Thank you,
The PokéForce Staff Team
Now that our Spring Demo has finished up, it's a great time for the team to reflect on what went well, what could be improved, where we went wrong, and we'd like to share some of that insight with you. That was an incredible two weeks that had so many high points, so many new memories created, and we welcomed so many new faces as well! It was a chaotic time for our entire staff team, with our community support & moderation teams rising to the challenge, and for our development teams who watched their hard work over the last few months get put to the test. We've also broken records, established new ones, and shone some light onto what needs to be changed for our next iteration of PokéForce. Without further ado, let's go over what we learned, and congratulate everyone who participated in this Demo, whether you were a player, or a staff member!
The Servers
It was quite clear in the beginning that the servers didn't like each other! The poor Battle Engine and Game Server, while were happy with each other, and communicated peacefully for the most part, would sometimes get into an argument about data being shared between the two, and one (mostly the game server!) would disagree and decide it didn't want to talk to the Battle Engine anymore. What a grump!This proved to have a trickle down effect where battles finishing and being transmitted to the game server to process (i.e, update your Pokemon's health, trigger plugins on gym trainers/leaders, etc) would cause other bugs to happen. This was especially frustrating in our first couple of days while we tried to track down what was causing these servers to disagree with each other. It wasn't quite so clear at first, so we were throwing everything we could at the wall to see what we could do, and eventually we found the core issue. It wasn't a perfect solution but put the servers into a stable state so that we weren't closing battle rooms prematurely, which was another point of frustration.
However, this Demo was massive in helping us figure out the core problem, something that would have been impossible to find in our Beta Programme, and for that we are eternally grateful. Sometimes there are just things you cannot find until you have hundreds of people tackling it from different angles. We are now working on a solution where data transmission is taken out of the equation, and we use a messaging broker (RabbitMQ, to be exact) to ensure that messages between the two servers aren't out of order, and no longer need to talk to each other directly, which will prove to be more robust in the future.
As for the game-server, we faced another issue directly linked to the previous issue, where someones save file grew in size.. to a whopping 500mb! Whenever this poor soul would login to the server, it would deadlock one of our threads and crash the rest of the server. We legitimately zip-bombed our own server, hah! Once we sorted that particular issue (solved by simply not saving defeated gym trainers as a List, but rather as a Set), the game-server went back to it's stable self, and the rest of the Demo went on without a hitch.
However, the entire process of needing to put out fires with random bugs like these, taught us that using something like Java for our back-end servers wasn't sustainable, and we're going back to the drawing board with our core. @Triston, @Benoon, and I have decided that for future-proofing our growth and stability, we're going to do our servers in Rust. This is an exciting development for us, and we'll have more information to share on that change in the near-future.
Statistics
Now for some numbers! I mentioned previously that we broke records, and I'd like to give more information on some other various fun facts!
First up is our peak online count, on our first hour of being live, our top online count was 1,100 people (give or take a few 10s there), which broke our record of 700 online in our Summer Demo. That's truly incredible and keeps speaking to how much we're growing as a niche Pokémon MMORPG. Understandably people were frustrated with the less-than-ideal launch, and we ended up stabilizing at around 200-300 people online concurrently after the first couple of days.
As for the total amount of unique accounts that played, that number hit 7,988, which is an approximate jump of about 1,000 unique accounts.
Of all players that logged in, 90% of you managed to complete the tutorial and choose your starter Pokémon, fantastic!
Of all players only 251 managed to conquer the Community Support challenge, earning themselves the 'Community Conqueror Badge' on their trainer cards.
There was quite a bit more interest in the Petal Cloak however, being obtained by almost 1,700 players! This was quite a bit rarer than what we saw in our previous demo, which leads us to believe that many people didn't see the challenge through due to encountering bugs in the battle engine, which is absolutely reasonable, and is a point we need to be addressing in the future.
The rarest Pokémon was Seedot, which was obtained by only a single player, followed closely by Scyther which was obtained by two players.
The most common starter choice was Cyndaquil, being picked by almost 2,900 players, followed by Totodile which was chosen by around 2,000 players. Magnemite shockingly comes in third, sparking the hearts of approximately 1,300 players. Chikorita was chosen by a bit more than 600 players, but surprisingly only two players leveled Chikorita high enough to fully evolve it into a Meganium. Mankey was picked by around 500 players, and Doduo was left in their cage, being chosen by only 300 players.
Of all the players who undertook the gym challenge, 82.4% of them were successful in defeating all three gym leaders! The remaining 12.6% defeated only a single gym leader, and 4.9% defeated two gym leaders.
Absolutely amazing!
The Future
While we're calling this Demo a massive success in the grand scheme of things, we're committed to getting back to the drawing board to improve various aspects of the game, and we want to thank everyone who persevered through the issues, and for helping us shine some light on what needs work, and where.
We mentioned previously that we are no longer offering exclusive cosmetics for Demos, and I want to get into that a little bit, as I'm sure people will be wondering why. In the future, we are no longer going to be announcing Demo dates and building towards them, instead we're going to move into a more agile development curve, and releasing what we'll be calling "Snapshots" of the game. What this will mean is when we feel the game is stable, and there's new things to test or try, we'll drop the Snapshot and invite people to play. This also means we'll be saving player progress between each Snapshot (barring anything that requires a hard reset), leading up to a launch (where progress will be reset for a final time, and we'll launch for real!), which will help us, in addition to the Beta Programme, to make sure that everything is snug and ready for a real release. Any account that participates in these Snapshots will also be awarded a badge that signifies that you were here for this drive towards launch, and we'll be looking into other potential rewards such as a founders pack on launch, but more on that later.
Another point of contention that we want to address before Launch is access to a Mobile (Android) client, and it's something we're going to hone in on while we rebuild our cores. I'm happy to announce that supporting Mobile will be top priority for the next Snapshot, so phone users rejoice!
All in all, once again a Demo has inspired the team to continue working on the game, knowing that we have such an amazing community behind us, and we're excited to keep working towards delivering what we hope is one of the best Pokémon MMORPGs ever! Thank you all so much for being with us through thick and thin, and we'll be sharing more progress updates soon, so stay tuned!
Thank you,
The PokéForce Staff Team
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(Just kidding – that badge was seriously tough to earn this time!
) and bold technical pivots proves PokéForce is in visionary hands. Can't wait to see Rust-powered servers and Snapshots unfold!
