[crazyj48s]

This caught my eye because I'm a lurker here on Hacker News who actually plays this game! I'm super excited you are posting here because I really want to learn more about your server architecture. Can you provide more info on your java stack as well as the kind of hardware is running the site? Previous games had 300+ users, so scalability shouldn't be an issue yet, but have you planned for that?

Once criticism: For the time I've been playing, the game has been evolving rather quickly, and new features seem to have taken precedence over client stability.

[wizzo]

We've actually taken a pretty homebrew approach and aren't using any external frameworks - just Tomcat and MySQL. On the hardware side we're using Linode shared servers so that we can quickly and easily scale up or down as needed. The game code is pretty efficient - we've run tests with thousands of players and had no problems, on modest hardware, so we're looking forward to growing quickly!

It's true that we've had some stability issues at times, but we're trying to cover a lot of platforms (Android, iOS, webOS, web) and add a lot of new features to improve the game. Now that we've officially launched (on 10/1) stability will definitely our #1 priority, though.

[crazyj48s]

Interesting - since this started as a hobby, any thoughts on open sourcing the client or server code or documenting the client/server communication so the community could build clients? I figure folks would be able to pretty easily reverse engineer it with the web client now, anyways.