After 1.1 million plays in soft launch and countless updates, Vortelli’s has finally
been released globally on Poki. You can play it here:
//poki/en/g/vortellis-pizza
My Journey with PlayCanvas
I started working with
PlayCanvas in July of 2024. After one year of on and off work, I released a playable
version of Vortelli’s in mid-July 2024. After having spent so long working on the same
project, I had no idea if it was any good. It received a small amount of attention from
Twitter and the PlayCanvas forums. Around the same time, I sent a demo to Poki. I was
absolutely delighted to learn that the Poki team loved the demo and wanted to work with
me! I signed their publishing agreement and over the next few weeks, I worked with them
to integrate their API and monetize the game with ads.
At the end of August, Vortelli’s
was soft launched in a few test regions, Brazil, France, Italy, Sweden and Turkey. 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 leaving angry reviews complaining they couldn’t click on
anything in the game. After hours of stressful debugging, I found a time code bug in
the netcode I’d written where players with low spec devices were sometimes getting
desynced and weren’t able to interact with objects in the game world. In a mild panic,
I managed to implement and deploy a fix. I learned that the dt variable can drift over
time making it unsuitable for precise time keeping, use performance.now() instead.
Unfortunately that was just the start of my problems.
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 has been featured on the front
page of Poki and there were thousands of new players finding my game. I believe Poki’s
system automatically moves games with strong user engagement to the front
page.
Eventually the player count settled down and I got to work on automating the
server scaling. I knew I couldn’t wake up at 4:30 every morning to manage servers. 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. I didn’t get this 100%
perfect on my first try, there was at least one time 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 PlayCanvas community, Twitter and the Poki team. During
the soft launch period, Vortelli’s was played 1.1 million times.
PlayCanvas has proven
to be very reliable, especially across multiple devices of varying specs. Uploading
PlayCanvas builds to Poki is very simple. In the PlayCanvas editor, I can simply
download a .zip of my entire project, then upload the same .zip into Poki’s developer
dashboard.
PlayCanvas and Poki work well together when it comes to error tracking. The
Poki dashboard maintains a live feed of the console errors coming from players’
browsers. PlayCanvas provides very clear error messages containing script file names
and line numbers, even in exported builds which has made it very easy to track down
issues even in production.
Despite the occasional stressful situation, this has been a
really fulfilling project. I have a few Vortelli’s updates planned and of course I’m
open to suggestions from the community. If you have any questions about
Poki/PlayCanvas, please let me know, I’ll do my best to help!
