omfg wtf r u talking about its a game not a jail u r trying to get it out not in wow

y not jus manage a starbucks

ill take a large cofe thanx

If somebody told you they were going to do a Flash based MMO in a month then you should have ran away. It took our team of eight nearly eight months of fulltime work to get ours "done". And done is used rather loosely as new game features are being added by us and by requests from players.

The server and PHP you don't really need to worry about since players don't have direct access to them. If the server does get leaked then you should have some legal recourse as that kind of thing is generally covered in a contract. Javascript I'm not sure there is really anything you can do about it since the entire code is downloaded to the client computer. SWF is more or less an open format so there is really nothing stopping somebody from decompiling unless you use some kind of SWF obfuscator. You aren't going to stop people from copying your game if they want to. What you can do is continually offer new items and areas so your game is better then any of the copies and get a lawyer to craft a EULA that forbids reverse engineering so you can take legal action against people that do copy it. If the copy protection on a game like Assassins Creed 2 is broken within hours (something that had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in) then something for a Flash MMO isn't going to stop a determined hacker. Worry more about spending the money to make the game fun.

In regards to programming this type of game, I've hired over 5 different programmers, and its taken over a year now, and we still havent got it completed. Each person I've hired has been a "professional" freelancer so either I've hired the wrong people or it takes longer than you'd imagine.

What kind of freelancers?

And if they are expected to be sole developer, then you are looking at senior/lead type of level which don't come cheap, unless you can adequately manage outsourced work with all the pitfalls it involves. The hourly rate is usually in 3 digits for this type of work. Outsourcing managers usually cost even more since they have to juggle a lot of risk.

Programming the rough skeleton from which one can iterate should not take more than two weeks full-time. This involves full vertical stack, deployed and testable with placeholders. Setting this up is almost certainly high-level work. Once such infrastructure is in place, incremental additions can be made where freelance work is more suitable.

One advice when dealing with this type of work - agree on completion date. Make sure each piece can be completed in a week. If it's not, walk away. Don't renegotiate, don't discuss, don't elaborate, reschedule, etc... Agree on one week of work, what will be completed. Make sure you both agree it's doable in a week. After this agreement is made, features can no longer be added, so unless something is a show stopper, the plan is not changed. If a show stopper is encountered it may be simpler to abandon entire task and start from scratch.

This way you don't waste months on nothing. Less than a week is not viable since it leaves no room for variation. Changes and renegotiation on this type of work will devastate the project, so plan small, move fast and instantly kill anything that isn't working without thinking or sunk costs will kill the project.

Also, if hiring from various bargain sites, give first, simple and identical task to 5 people. After a week, pay them all, but choose the one that completed on time and closest to scope. Usually, finding one in five is quite hard. Perhaps repeat second time. Once you have one or two proven candidates, go with real work, but stick with weekly plans.

If somebody told you they were going to do a Flash based MMO in a month then you should have ran away. It took our team of eight nearly eight months of fulltime work to get ours "done". And done is used rather loosely as new game features are being added by us and by requests from players.[/quote]
Eight months for completed project.

Without full plan, arguing what is completed is pointless. Full plan means Gantt chart of every feature broken down to <day tasks, assigned to known pool of developers best matched for their specialty.

First, the two weeks, is scaffolding. One week for client, one week for server. It must not take that long, Flash provides everything. This gives you a working project where people can log in. It's not optimized, nice or good, but it's something touchable.

Then you go from there.

The biggest mistake that people make is that they work for 8 months without producing anything. See above. One year for nothing.

Very few projects are ever "completed" so rather than trying to do it right, move in small steps from day one.

One thing, especially when it comes to Flash is that developers that start such projects simply have no understanding of what it takes. Implementing server/client system is really not rocket science (Club Penguin, Zynga, etc...) as long as someone knows that they are doing. It cannot take months, we're talking days to few weeks. Especially since at this point discussing scalability and similar without a robust market analysis (which simply doesn't exist) cannot be done. But using accepted best practices will get you results fast.

This is the proverbial difference between 10x or 100x productivity in programmers. Web development has gotten fairly standardized, professionals will set you up a store and everything in under a day. Your neighbor kid who "knows computers" will take one week to clobber together a Django monstrocity.

The rest is then the details, content, etc., but that is not something programmers do. They will be improving on existing base to allow all of that to work.

You brought up Zynga, which reminds me that there are games similar to mine which haven't been copied. How do you think Zynga has prevented people from making copies of their games such as FarmVille, or YoVille?

You brought up Zynga, which reminds me that there are games similar to mine which haven't been copied. How do you think Zynga has prevented people from making copies of their games such as FarmVille, or YoVille?

They don't, they are the one who is doing the copying. Today they could probably just sue anyone trying to copy.

But Zynga's true value lies in data. They measure everything, every click, every crop grown and so on. The rest simply doesn't matter, it's having access to this data that allows development of products. They might as well be selling tomatoes. This is where value of the web lies.


Lesson to take away is - if someone wants to copy what you have, they'll just throw 5 million and 800 people at it.

Eight months for completed project.

Without full plan, arguing what is completed is pointless. Full plan means Gantt chart of every feature broken down to <day tasks, assigned to known pool of developers best matched for their specialty.

First, the two weeks, is scaffolding. One week for client, one week for server. It must not take that long, Flash provides everything. This gives you a working project where people can log in. It's not optimized, nice or good, but it's something touchable.

Then you go from there.

The biggest mistake that people make is that they work for 8 months without producing anything. See above. One year for nothing.

Very few projects are ever "completed" so rather than trying to do it right, move in small steps from day one.

"Done" for us is a game that is making quite a bit of money and more projects in the pipe then we know what to do with. Because of the nature of Facebook games you have to continually add new features or lose paying customers. So I don't think there any truly "done" Facebook games (well any ones that are interested in long term profit).

To be honest, I don't think I've used a Gantt chart in my life. We kind of just wing things which undoubtedly has added development time to our projects. But for the most part the team followed your general outline. A working client/server was completed very early in the project and then new features were done as vertical slices. For MMO stuff agile/vertical slice type stuff is the way to go or you will just get bogged down in feature creep.

As for Zynga, once your company is worth multi hundreds of millions of dollars then sicking the lawyers on anything that steals your game is pretty trivial. Antheus already posted the link, but Zynga is well known from taking other game ideas and crunching the data to make the game sell lots of items. Data mining is the true key to the success of Zynga's games. Spending a bunch of money on advertising didn't hurt either.

While the type of piracy you are worried about happens I don't think its as big of a deal as you think it is. Private servers generally suck because there is nobody around and they don't have the latest features. To repeat my last post, make sure you protect yourself with a good EULA and worry more about making a fun game. People won't support your game just because its there.