Amitt Mahajan's Social Games Seattle presentation on how to design and develop big social games that reach millions of users daily. Examples from the Facebook game FarmVille are used to illustrate ways to capture large audiences and retain them. Presented December 16th, 2009 in Seattle

2. Building BIG Social Games Amitt Mahajan Lead Developer - FarmVille December 16, 2009

3. FarmVille is about RETENTION 28M Players Daily 80M Monthly

4. So how do we design games to have wide appeal and good retention?

7. Visual Appeal Bright Graphics “ Moments of Joy”

9. We have our design, now how do we implement it?

11. Client Performance Long load times and sluggish framerate KILL retention Get something visible as soon as possible Stream in content, block on load for ONLY what’s needed (HUD/User Data) Adapt rendering to framerate

12. Server Scaling The Cloud – Autoscale! Everything is Async & Cached Parallelize all parts of architecture DB is redundant datastore only

14. Q&A

15. We’re hiring! zynga.com/jobs Email: amahajan@zynga.com