I love this forum post from the 1 vs 100 team:
Two years ago, our team was asked to develop and implement a new kind of game. Our guiding principles: it had to be scheduled like a TV show, it had to be social, and it had to support hundreds of thousands of players at once. "Above all," we were told, "it has to be big. It has to be something nobody has seen before. Go big or go home."
Now, as we've wrapped up 1 vs 100 Beta and are getting ready for launch, I think we've accomplished that goal. We've faced some big challenges along the way, and done some things no game has ever done before. We've hosted a game with over 100,000 concurrent users in the same session. Doing that required designing a new server architecture, different than that used by traditional MMOs--we didn't want to shard groups of users into their own sessions on their own servers. Everyone gets to play together!
Speaking of servers, 1 vs 100 is synchronous in a way no other game is. Hundreds of thousands of users playing a game show together means that most of the players, most of the time, are making the same server calls. 1 vs 100 is so synchronized, in fact, that everyone is making those same calls within a couple of hundred milliseconds. Our server was designed to handle that kind of traffic. Some of the other services we use are not; they handle heavy load by assuming that requests are evenly spread out over time. This required some fancy footwork on our part not to overload our partners' servers.
Then there was Chris Cashman. We knew we wanted to have a live host talking about the action; we knew it would make the experience really come to life. We didn't realize just how much the host added until we had our first beta session in Canada. For that session, most of the team and our families stayed after work to play on the three or four consoles in our common area. Everyone listened, rapt, as Chris introduced the show and talked through breaks, mentioning (and making fun of) players by name. That seemingly effortless banter which adds so much to the game was a huge challenge in terms of technology, design, and production. The host audio tech is a delicate balance between bandwidth and end-to-end latency. The show production team and Chris had to learn how to do breaks given delays that varied night to night based on the vagaries of the Internet. Think about that the next time you hear him say "Back to you, Jen" and Jen's audio starts to play with natural timing.
There are many other challenges I could talk about. The game would not have been possible without a team of incredibly smart, dedicated people solving new problems every day (plus a large number of pizzas and subs delivered to Microsoft after hours). 1 vs 100 also would not have been a success without the players. Thanks to all of you who stuck with us through the beta, put up with some hiccups along the way, and helped us make history. We look forward to seeing you all again in our launch season!
I was always impressed with how well they handled so many simultaneous people. Well done guys.
