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.
