Workshop - Best of Both Worlds_ Combine KG and Vector search for enhanced R...
It's not a product, it's a service!
1. It’s not a product, it’s a service!
Maciej Mróz
CTO, Ganymede
mmroz@ganymede.eu
2. Focused on
synchronous
multiplayer
games for most of
our existence
Office in
Kraków
city center
Online
gaming
company
60+ people
and
growing
Social casino,
arcade and
skill games
Online
gaming
company
About Us
Founded
10+ years
ago
Office in
Kraków
city center
2
6. Development Process
“Lean startup” approach
6
Validate your game idea first
•Everything else usually can be deferred
•MVP is probably half of what you think it is
Every game
is a learning opportunity
Be prepared for the unexpected
Careful about future
proofing by developers
7. Team dedicated to
a game may actually
grow post release
Users expect new
content/features to be
delivered on regular
basis
A lot of effort spent on
optimization
• A/B testing
experiments
• Exploratory analytics
Successful games are
serving players for
many years
Development Process
Release is only the beginning...
7
9. Development Process
Scrum in game production
9
Does not apply
to prototyping
process
(ad-hoc 2-3
person teams)
Dedicated
Product
Owners and
Scrum Masters
External
training/coaching
absolutely worth it
Getting it right is
very challenging
10. Development Process
Scaling game development/operations
10
Game teams are
independent of each other
Shared technology
•GitHub-like development model
•Some oversight necessary
Teams handle big part of
operations
11. Data
Analytics = process + tools
11
• Leaning more to the process side
• Tools are a solvable problem
• Collection/storage is cheap
• Analysis is a significant investment
• Data science know-how takes a lot of
time to develop and is hard to acquire
• Third party tools are getting better
12. Data
Scientific approach to product
development
12
Don’t guess if you
don’t have to:
• The answer may be in
the data you already
have
• Or in the data you
can easily get
Guessing is fine,
but:
• State your
assumptions
• Validate afterwards
13. Data
Information flow
13
Well defined common KPIs:
• Accessible to anyone in game team
within <24 h
• Comparative analysis of games
Raw data access for game teams
• Can’t predict all needs upfront
• Deep product knowledge required for
meaningful insights
• Per-game internal KPIs
14. Technology
Shared technology
14
Cross cutting concerns
• Scalability, availability,
infrastructure monitoring
• Build, deployment
Know-how and
skills can be brought
from one project
to another
Services shared
between games
• Analytics, payment
processing
Standards
for local
and production
environment
15. Technology
Continuous Integration
15
Everything has to be
in source control!
Frequent local releases
•Fully automated, based on development branch
Always ready for production
release
•Merge to master
•CI prepares release, but pushing it to
players is human action
•Anyone on the game team can do it
16. Technology
Production environment
16
• All new games in AWS
• On the surface it’s not the most cost effective solution
• A lot of added value (RDS, DynamoDB, ELB, CloudWatch …)
• APIs allow us to automate tasks traditionally done by human administrators
• Bigger percentage of engineering efforts focused on core business
• Production release takes <10 min for any project (usually much less,
we cache prebuilt binaries)
• Quick rollbacks (<1 min)
17. Technology
Multiple client platforms
17
• A tax on development cost
• “Mobile” is much more than one platform: on the
OS side there’s iOS/Android/WP + tablet vs phone
form factors (different design, possibly
functionality)
• Cross platform client technologies help
We currently use Adobe AIR
May switch to something else
18. Technology
Software quality
18
Server problems are often much
worse than client problems
• In online game if something breaks
once per million sessions, it is sure
to happen!
Good engineering practices pay
off, bad ones come back to bite
you
• Sometimes years later
Balance vs development velocity is necessary!
20. People
We are in it for a long run
20
• Successful games will entertain players for many years
• People need to be prepared for a marathon, not a sprint
• Crunch is not an option, we work 40-hour weeks
• Teamwork is critical
• A lot of know-how is only in a person’s head
• Happy employees stay with us longer
21. People
Killing products/shifting focus
21
• Not everyone handles it well
• Conflicting points of view are unavoidable
• Always a tough decision
• Treat it as learning opportunity
22. People
Hiring
22
• Not only about technical competence!
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing, critical to our success
• Communication skills
• Personality fit
• Industry knowledge
• Passion!
