Author Archives: Shawn

Tim Schafer, Double Fine to crowd-source a new adventure game

By Shawn | Published: February 9, 2012
Okay, I admit, I am a Tim Schafer fan.  If you know what we do at FableLabs, it should be no surprise that I love to see good stories in a game.  And Schafer has produced some of the most beautiful and story-rich graphics adventure games in the past.  He now turns to Kickstarter to [...]
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gevent compatible Memcache client

By Shawn | Published: February 8, 2012
I have been looking for a memcache client that plays well with gevent, and I stumbled upon one today: https://github.com/esnme/ultramemcache It’s written and maintained by the good folks at ESN.me.  They built Battlelog, the social network for Battlefield 3, using gevent and this memcache client.  They also released a gevent-compatible MySQL driver and a few [...]
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Game Design: Rise of the Clones

By Shawn | Published: February 8, 2012
There has been a recent flurry of media coverage on big game companies releasing clones of games developed by smaller, indie studios.  Here are a couple of claims made by two studios against Zynga: http://kotaku.com/5879046/zynga-totally-rips-off-tiny-tower http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/29/buffalo-studios-blasts-zynga-for-copying-bingo-blitz-social-game/ And here is a more recent and more serious accusation that is actually turning into a lawsuit, against our [...]
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Key stats to monitor for your Membase cluster

By Shawn | Published: December 23, 2011
Happy holidays everyone!  I realize that from working with Membase in our production over the last year, I’ve collected a few key commands in my .bashrc for quickly checking vital stats on my Membase servers, many of them came from the good folks at Couchbase.   Their wiki has improved over the year as well, [...]
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Migrating Membase Cluster – Part 2

By Shawn | Published: December 11, 2011
After up all night babysitting the rebalance process, I am happy to report that it was a rather uneventful night of maintenance.  The rebalance itself took 8-9 hours to complete, and then took another hour for all the replicas to get saved to the disk also.  Theoretically, I didn’t need to take the site down [...]
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Migrating Membase Cluster – Part 1

By Shawn | Published: December 11, 2011
I got an email from EC2 a few days ago that a number of our instances that serves Animal Party have pending reboots coming up.   It turns out that ALL of the 8 nodes in our membase cluster are scheduled for a reboot.   Sure, a reboot on any database server is expected to [...]
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Trouble handling Icon\r file with Git

By Shawn | Published: December 9, 2011
We installed a new process for managing content couple weeks ago, where we had one of the game designer check in his CSV data file into git so we can pull his changes and run the data through our tests automatically. He was on a Mac, so he used GitHub for Mac (very user friendly, [...]
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Setup Namespace URL for Flex project in FlashDevelop

By Shawn | Published: November 4, 2011
Our game client at Tribal Crossing is all written in Flex, and naturally we used Flash Builder to handle our project.  However, I’ve always been partial to FlashDevelop, a much leaner IDE that has great editor features, faster compile time, and fantastic community support.  After being fed up with another Eclipse (the IDE that Flash Builder [...]
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Issue with “npm install socket.io” on CentOS 5

By Shawn | Published: October 31, 2011
Hey guys, I just ran into some issue installing socket.io using npm on my personal CentOS 5 box.  All the other node modules installed fine – but not socket.io.  After some searching around, I found that it appears to be an issue with the version of tar that came with CentOS 5, which was 1.15. [...]
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Video Games Live Tour – Damn it was good.

By Shawn | Published: October 30, 2011
I went to the Video Games Live tour with Rick in LA earlier this weekend.  We heard tracks from their past shows on Spotify, and we just decided to grab some tickets on a whim a couple months ago.   We know they play music from many classic games which are also our favorites, and the [...]
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