The Story of Vortelli’s Pizza Devortel · Follow Published in Poki · 8 min read · Dec 2,
2024 -- 🏀 Listen Share
You can play Vortelli’s Pizza on Poki!
The Making Of
I’ve always
liked the idea of creating experiences for the web. 🏀 Nowadays, almost every mobile and
desktop device has a web browser and visitors can experience your creation without the
friction 🏀 of downloading and installing a separate app. Prior to creating Vortelli’s, I
dabbled with tools like Three.js, Phaser and Construct, 🏀 but I never actually completed
a project. I kept falling into the cycle of starting a project with excitement and
🏀 motivation but as I’d encounter problems, I’d gradually lose interest and eventually
quit.
In mid-2024, I promised myself that I was 🏀 going to break that cycle by finishing
and releasing a 3D multiplayer web game. I still wasn’t proficient with any 🏀 particular
game engine and I spent many hours reading and watching YouTube videos trying to decide
on the perfect engine. 🏀 I eventually figured out that there was no such thing as a
perfect engine and I really just needed to 🏀 pick one, learn the basics and start
building. I ended up choosing PlayCanvas because I was already pretty comfortable with
🏀 JavaScript and I found its editor very simple to use.
I spent the majority of my time
figuring out how to 🏀 get the multiplayer netcode working. At first, the prototype game
didn’t have any sort of goal or objective, it was 🏀 just an open world where you could
hang out with other players. Maybe it was because I’m a solo dev, 🏀 but I started to feel
that players would quickly become bored with this experience. Some kind of minigame
needed to 🏀 be added to give players a sense of purpose. I went with a pizza cooking
minigame because everyone loves pizza, 🏀 right? I chose the name ‘Vortelli’s Pizza,’
because it sounds like the name of a somewhat believable pizza shop and 🏀 I couldn’t find
any real life businesses on Google using that name already.
After having spent well
over a year working 🏀 on this game by myself, I had no idea if it was any good. I had
done some small-scale play 🏀 testing with friends and family and I still had a long list
of things that I wanted to add and 🏀 improve. I was starting to feel burnt out and I
decided that I just had to force myself to release 🏀 it as-is. I knew I could always keep
working on it after launch if players were enjoying it. And if 🏀 nobody liked the game,
at the very least, I’d learn some lessons I could apply to my next game idea.
Finding
🏀 Poki
Within the first week after release, it received a small amount of attention from
Twitter and the PlayCanvas forums. Marketing 🏀 and promoting a game is really difficult
and requires a specialized skill set which I didn’t have. At first, I 🏀 didn’t even
consider looking for a publisher because I assumed publishers were only for Steam games
that people paid money 🏀 for. At some point, I stumbled upon Poki’s developer page. I
didn’t know much about them so I looked them 🏀 up on a site called SimilarWeb which was
estimating Poki’s monthly US traffic at around 70 million visits. This was 🏀 a
mind-boggling number, and the fact that Poki was offering to handle all the marketing
made me strongly consider working 🏀 with them. After I read the Medium article about Cem
Demir and ONRUSH Studio’s experience with Poki, I finally decided 🏀 to reach out.
I
wasn’t sure if I’d receive a response from the Poki team, but I still sent them a 🏀 link
to Vortelli’s just to see what would happen. When they responded, I was absolutely
delighted to learn that the 🏀 Poki team spent a significant amount of time playing my
game together and they loved it! It was a wonderful 🏀 feeling to learn that real players
in a different part of the world who I’ve never met found my game 🏀 fun and engaging.
Within a few days, we signed a contract and over the next few weeks, I worked with 🏀 Poki
to integrate their API and monetize the game.
Soft Launch
At the end of August 2024,
Vortelli’s moved into the soft 🏀 launch phase. This was my first time launching a game at
scale and I had no idea what to expect. 🏀 On the first day, my eyes were glued to the
stats dashboard and I kept checking my game server logs 🏀 over and over. I didn’t get
much actual work done that day! The player count peaked at 12 on the 🏀 first day of soft
launch.
The next day, I noticed a worrying netcode bug and players were starting to
leave angry 🏀 reviews complaining they couldn’t click on anything in the game. After
hours of stressful debugging, I found an issue with 🏀 my netcode where players with
low-spec devices were sometimes getting desynced from the server and weren’t able to
interact with 🏀 objects in the game world. In a mild panic, I managed to implement and
deploy a fix but unfortunately that 🏀 was just the start of my problems.
Growing
Pains
The next morning I was woken up around 4:30am by a notification that 🏀 all the
servers were completely full. At this point I had two servers, one in Dallas USA and
another in 🏀 Frankfurt Germany, each capable of supporting 40 players. At first, I
thought this was a bug and maybe departing players 🏀 weren’t getting disconnected
correctly. Unsure, I created two more servers and within minutes they were also
completely full. Vortelli’s somehow 🏀 had 160 players online! I kept creating new servers
and they seemed to be filling up as quickly as I 🏀 could launch them. This was not a bug,
Vortelli’s had been featured on the front page of Poki Brazil and 🏀 there were thousands
of new players finding the game. I believe Poki’s system automatically moves games with
strong user engagement 🏀 to the front page.
Eventually the player count settled down. I
knew I couldn’t wake up at 4:30 every morning to 🏀 manage servers so I got to work on
automating the server scaling. I used Linode’s API to automatically create new 🏀 servers
as the player count increases and then automatically shut them down as the player count
decreases. This process was 🏀 far more complex than I expected and I didn’t get it right
on my first try. There was at least 🏀 one occasion when I accidentally shut down servers
with players still on them. My apologies if you were one of 🏀 them.
Over the next few
weeks, I worked to fix bugs and implement some new features. There were all kinds of
🏀 helpful suggestions from the Poki team and the PlayCanvas community. The soft launch
period lasted about two months during which 🏀 Vortelli’s was played 1.1 million
times.
Global Release
On November 10, 2024, Vortelli’s Pizza was released globally. I
noticed a bump in 🏀 traffic almost immediately. The player count peaked at around 400
concurrent players on the first day. The next day, it 🏀 was 1,400 concurrent players and
the day after that, 2,800. Vortelli’s was quickly moving up the ranks and was now
🏀 displayed at the top of the Poki homepage. I had dreamed of one day seeing Vortelli’s
high up on the 🏀 Poki homepage near Subway Surfers and Crossy Road. I didn’t really think
that was a strong possibility, but there it 🏀 was!
There were so many new players the
servers were having trouble keeping up. I had to upgrade my matchmaking server 🏀 twice
because its CPU kept reaching its limit which would cause long connection delays for
players. Twice, I had to 🏀 contact my hosting company, Linode, to get my account limit
increased. Initially, my account was only allowed to operate 50 🏀 servers at a time and I
needed a lot more. Linode kindly raised the limit to 100, but by the 🏀 next day, I was
already running 92 servers to keep all the players online. Fortunately, they raised it
to 200 🏀 and I implemented some changes to allow more players on each server, thus not
requiring as many.
The first week after 🏀 global launch felt like a blur. As of the time
of writing, Vortelli’s Pizza has been played over 7 million 🏀 times and the highest
recorded concurrent player count is 3,035! I expect the player count to settle down
over the 🏀 coming weeks and months. Almost every waking hour has been spent watching
server logs, reading user feedback, and implementing fixes. 🏀 It has been a challenging
time, but I’ve found it immensely rewarding.
Future Plans
Currently, I’m working on
fixing bugs and improving 🏀 the game’s UI. I was definitely not expecting Vortelli’s to
receive this many players and for this reason, there are 🏀 a few things that aren’t
working as well as they could be. For example, the custom games table is practically
🏀 unusable at the moment because it’s filled with hundreds of games in random order. I’m
going to redesign it to 🏀 make it more user friendly. For players who are sick of randoms
stealing their pizzas, I’m going to add the 🏀 ability to play a solo game by pressing a
single button. I’m also going to set up a Discord server 🏀 so I can communicate with the
players and allow a place for people to submit their ideas for new game 🏀 content.
It’s
safe to say that the global launch of Vortelli’s has significantly exceeded my
expectations. I’m eager to get to 🏀 know the newly created Vortelli’s community. I’m
really excited to see where this game will go. I still have a 🏀 lot to learn, but it’s
pretty thrilling to imagine all the new experiences I can create for people to
enjoy.
If 🏀 you’d like to reach out, you can find me on Twitter. You can also find me on
the Vortelli’s Pizza 🏀 Discord.
