Author Archives: Shawn

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 […]
Posted in Development | Leave a comment

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 […]
Posted in Development | Leave a comment

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, […]
Posted in Development | 1 Comment

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 […]
Posted in Development | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

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. […]
Posted in Development | Tagged | Leave a comment

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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Sending batch app-to-user request on Facebook

By Shawn | Published: September 1, 2011
With the release of the “live game feed” on Facebook, game requests and notifications now gets their own real estate on the upper right corner of your screen.   This immediately reminded me of the good old days of “notification war” on Facebook circa 2009.   Applications had free reign over your notifications and many […]
Posted in Development | 4 Comments

Animal Party gets coverage in Inside Social Game

By Shawn | Published: July 18, 2011
Animal Party hit the big 100k DAU and 800k MAU mark over the weekend!   Inside Social Game interviewed Tommy Wu, my co-founder/CEO, for a few quotes.  You can see the article here. We’re now doing various optimization and content tweak for Animal Party while continuing ahead on our next title.
Posted in Gaming Bizdev | Leave a comment

Animal Party hitting 500k MAU; Facebook Credits as currency

By Shawn | Published: July 13, 2011
Animal Party joined the 6waves publishing network several weeks ago and we’ve been getting more traffic.  We also transitioned our monetization strategy to use Facebook Credits as a in-game currency, which made us eligible for various Facebook promotion that brought in additional traffic.  As a result, we broke 500k MAU for the first time since […]
Posted in Gaming Bizdev | Leave a comment

Audio and Slides for Membase (Couchbase) Webinar

By Shawn | Published: April 14, 2011
DZone has posted the slides and audio from the webinar I did with Perry.  It covers how we’re using Membase to scale our backend for Animal Party.  I have to say that I felt rather nervous during the webinar, but years of experience talking in front of a classroom and public speaking seem to have […]
Posted in Development | Leave a comment