For this week's edition of Developer Journal, I again interview Will for another look into the creation of his game and what he learned from making the original Beat Me Up.
AA: How about some insight into the challenges of making this sequel? What have you decided to do differently or add that's resulted in new hurdles?
WP: Well in the first version, I was using a database to store all the user accounts but because of issues with Flash security I used a little PHP script to tunnel to it rather than directly accessing it from the game. This created bad scalability problems. Because of the popularity of the game, that little tunnel script totally blew up not once, not twice, but three times and brought the entire server down with it. This caused quite a headache between me and the web hosting company.
This time I'm going to access the database directly but there are a lot of tricks involved with it. It's very difficult to get the whole database stuff working directly from Flash and the fact that I expect upwards of 300,000 plays a day of my game have caused me to buy a dedicated server which wasn't cheap and it's a complicated process to set one up. But on the good side of things, it allows me a lot more freedom than what I had before with a bunch of stuff because I'll have complete control over the server.
AA: Sounds like the last game was pretty popular. Was it expected or were you surprised?
WP: I was very surprised, it was my first Flash game and the art quite frankly sucked. But people loved the excessive amount of blood and the sound effects and I think the fact that it was so simple. No learning the game required.
AA: What kind of feedback, if any, influenced your work on the sequel?
WP: I had a lot of feedback from players of the game. A lot of people wanted better art and more stuff to do in the level editor. Just to make it more polished so as a result I focused the sequel on making everything very polished but keeping the core game play.
AA: Right now are you just focused on finishing Beat Me Up Too or do you already have an idea of what your next game will be?
WP: Well, I'm really wanting to see what sort of response I get from Beat Me Up Too to determine what direction to go in next rather than jumping the gun.
AA: Finally, I just thought I'd throw this one out there; If you could make any game you wanted, with no limitation on resources, what would you make?
WP: Man that's a hard one.... I like a lot of different types of games. I've always wanted to make an old school Mega Man like game but with social hooks and multi-player support in it. I tried to do something like this back in 2004 but I never finished it. Perhaps I will resurrect the idea at some point.
AA: Ok, now I've gotta' ask if you're excited that Capcom is releasing Mega Man 9 and what do you think of their retro approach?
WP: I totally love it. I've been wanting them to do a game like this for years.
AA: All right! That wraps it up for this week. Thank you once again for showing us a little behind the scenes look at your project, Will.
I hope you enjoyed this mini interview with Will Perone. Next week I plan to do another art special showing off characters and items from the game. Don't forget to tune in!
Developer Journal part 1
Developer Journal part 2