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Case study: Adding Flock Multiplayer to an Android Game
Posted on June 28th, 2010 No commentsSince the private beta launch in early June, developers have published the first games on the Android market using the Flock multiplayer engine. In this post we take a look at SpWebGames’ “Othello/Reversi” game, which enabled multiplayer with Flock in a recent update.
Othello/Reversi is an ad-supported, turn-based board game which originally supported single-player and two-players-on-one-phone game modes. A perfect game to extend with multiplayer functionality. Flock is an event based multiplayer framework which can be integrated by adding one jar file to the project source, and which sends events to the Activity after calling FlockEngine.connect().
“I found Flock Engine to perfectly satisfy my requirements for adding multiplayer functionality to my game. The API is straightforward to learn, and the documentation and worked examples assisted in rapid implementation, with the bulk of the work done in a couple of days. The Flock team were on hand to answer my questions and consistently provided top notch support.”- Steve Pugh, developer of Othello/Reversi
After releasing the update on the Android market, users immediately started connecting to the servers. The daily connections saw a sharp rise over the first days, quickly stabilizing afterwards. The following chart portrays the number of connections during the first two weeks:
Currently the Othello/Reversi gameserver handles an average of 1,400 connections per day, with the players spending a total of 82 game-hours online every day.
The following screenshot shows more detailed statistics taken from a random day (time is in UTC). The interface includes a real-time ticker with the number of currently online users, and hourly overviews of connections, games played and the time users spent online.
The green bars represent total connections during an hour, the yellow bars just those which found an opponent (some players quit before a matching opponent is found). On average 75% of the Othello/Reversi players find opponents within the first 10 seconds.
After the release of the multiplayer update “Othello/Reversi” saw an increase in the advertisement revenue of about 30%.
“Presumably this would increase over time as the multiplayer feature will give the game a longer life.”We will follow the development of the numbers over the next few months as more and more users start playing online, with a follow-up post coming in mid-July.
About: Flock Multiplayer Engine is a start-up in beta, and offers two months free usage of a private gameserver without any obligations. If you are interested in adding multiplayer to an Android game, create an account and have a look at the SDK, examples and documentation.