Neverbug Entertainment & ZooLife
Neverbug Entertainment creates family-friendly games that celebrate creativity and combine rich play experiences with education and fun for all ages.
The three founders of Neverbug Entertainment are professional video game developers who made their marks on such large blockbusters as Doom, Halo Wars and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon 2. They recently decided to join forces and develop friendly, casual games on Facebook. After nine months of development, their kid-friendly app, ZooLife, is ready for primetime.
Environment
- FLEX
- MYSQL dedicated Joyent Smart Machine
- 2 SmartMachines web servers
- PHP
- JavaScript
- ActionScript
“My biggest worry for the whole project was how the servers would hold up. But after consulting with the Joyent team I’m confident we’re going to be able to scale as our traffic increases. The team has been very helpful in getting us up and running.”
- Michael Dickheiser, CTO, Neverbug Entertainment
The Challenge
Having made names for themselves in the offline game industry, the three set out to learn how to get up and running quickly for the casual Facebook game market.
A Cloud Hosting Solution: New to the casual game space, the team knew they needed a cloud host, but they weren’t sure how to go about finding the right one.
Reputation and reliability: The team knew they needed a cloud provider with a strong reputation and track record for reliability in the casual game market.
Integrated database: CTO Michael Dickheiser knew he wanted to build the company’s first game using SQL, a time tested database solution in the cloud.
Scalability: The team’s biggest worry was how its servers would hold up as the number of users grew. They knew they needed a provider that could help them scale effortlessly.
Bandwidth, Memory, Cost: Michael knew that if the Facebook apps they planned to develop scaled as they planned, they’d need a provider that could provide the bandwidth, memory, scalability and price point that would give them consistent uptime at a competitive cost.
The Solution
Cloud Hosting Solution: CTO Michael Dickheiser discovered that Joyent was a cloud hosting partner with Facebook, offering a free ¼ GB SmartMachine to Facebook developers wishing to develop and prototype in the cloud. He signed up for the program and quickly learned how to build a game app using Joyent’s infrastructure.
Reputation and reliability: Michael did some vendor research by speaking with Joyent customers and other influencers in the cloud market, and received positive references on Joyent’s delivery of Infrastructure-as-a-Service to developers of casual games.
Integrated database: The team was pleased to learn that Joyent offered a dedicated MySQL SmartMachine, and quickly started up its development.
Scalability: The team worked with Joyent’s Services team to map out its growth over time. Their plan is to expand horizontally on the MySQL side, then expand vertically as their games grow.
Support and Consultation: The team has enjoyed the consultative assistance of the Joyent Support team throughout their planning and deployment stages.
