Tweak Battle....

.... evolved from Smash Battle and was launched by Tweakers on April fools with the title (translated): “Tweakers releases Tweak Battle - Tech-site starts Game Studio”. It was pretty cool, the day before all Tweakers staff changed their avatars to their “8-bit” style character. Why blog about this now? Well, now some Tweakers created an Arcade machine a few days ago for it, it turned out to be quite awesome and I also accidentally stumbled upon some stats from April-fools day.

A while ago I added network multiplayer to Smash Battle (see old blog post) and then after that we/Jeroen got the idea to change all the characters into Tweakers editors/developers and launch the game as an April fools joke. The deadline was pretty tight, we had a lot of ideas for improvements and there were many glitches but we fixed all of them. We had to work many long nights and the night- and morning before the publication of the News at 8 o'clock.

Play stats

22:00 we fixed a problem that occasionally made a server crash, also you may notice the "active" & "joined" players lines to swap at that point, before that they were mixed up. The difference between the two is simply the number of spectators (you are "joined" if you connect and "active" when you play). Spectators were necessary because the game can hold a maximum of 4 players.

The only statistics we have, at the time gathered using a simple Munin plugin.

Ten blade servers

Ten seriously over-the-top servers were sponsored by True, and I'm sorry but I forgot the exact specs. We provisioned one of them as the main API server and the other we started nine games per (nine) server(s) on with all the different levels evenly distributed.

We did quite some last-minute optimizations, like removing the GUI for Servers, so running servers became a lot less CPU intensive. Previously we had to start them with xvfb (we basically used it as a /dev/null for the graphics). Even though I discovered by accident that SDL is so Awesome that it falls back to ncurses (see following image).

But in retrospect, we could have ran all the servers from my laptop . It was surely overkill for such a simple game with not that much Network traffic. But just in case it would go world-wide-viral, we could have handled it .

ncurses ASCII art rendering of a Tweak Battle server with no joined players.

Further improvements

Jeroen & Bert pushed me to replace the TCP/IP implementation with a UDP one, and this was a good idea. It made a big difference, even more than I expected. We also had to fix some glitches/artifacts that were caused by previous refactorings, i.e. that the game now runs on elapsed time, this created some problems with powerups to disappear too fast, and animations to go to fast here and there. Jeroen also designed and implemented all the Tweakers characters, which was a lot of work, Bert helped all-round and improved server provisioning a lot.

The “main” server

The main server is written in Symfony2 as a REST API (inspired by this implementation and Scenario Driven API Design). For documentation and source code check the bitbucket repo.

Maximum number of requests on /server/listing per second with- and without Varnish:

Requests per second:    43.34 [#/sec] (mean)
Requests per second:    12209.64 [#/sec] (mean) # with Varnish

We let Varnish cache this listing every 1 second(s). We talked to it asynchronously with C++ using libcurl. Storage used by the API was Redis.

The future

• git network_multiplayer branch merged into master. But I would like to preserve both character sets, Smash Battle and Tweak Battle.
• refactoring^2
• nicknames support, online rankings.
• (for Tweak Battle:) actual Nerf Guns + Bullets.
• more game types like capture the flag, instagib, last man standing.
• intelligent bots.