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.
