Game design, game programming and more

Twenty Years of Guild Wars

So many folks have reached out to me to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launch of Guild Wars on April 28, 2005, that it encouraged me to write this little bitty. I was heartened to see an article about Guild Wars in GameRant, which talked about the server infrastructure of the game, and most […]

Whose bug is this anyway?!?

At a certain point in every programmer’s career we each find a bug that seems impossible because the code is right, dammit! So it must be the operating system, the tools or the computer that’s causing the problem. Right?!? Today’s story is about some of those bugs I’ve discovered in my career. This bug is […]

Scaling Guild Wars for massive concurrency

TL;DR: Server-side game recording is awesome for performing scalability testing, as well as reproducing game bugs and enabling players to replay their game experiences. How to load-test game servers In anticipation of the launch of Guild Wars 2 in August I thought it would be interesting to talk about some of the techniques we used […]