ByteClub

The Idea

The main idea behind the ByteClub platform is to allow you, the developer, to add online multiplayer interactions to your iPhone games/apps with a relative ease. Usually, in order to enable iPhone players to interact with one another without being on the same Wi-Fi network, you need to host a server. In this case, we are doing that for you. You might need to keep track of your players, allow them to create accounts and login - we also take care of that. You focus on the game and the user interaction and we focus on making sure that your apps can talk to one another. All of that, by using one simple Objective-C library.

How it came about

In order to create Scramboni, we had to overcome many of the same challenges that every developer faces when making multiplayer games: creating and maintaining infrastructure, handling large numbers of concurrent network connections, dealing with an unpredictable nature of the Internet etc. The next logical step would be to make results of our efforts available to other people.

Why do we need another "platform"?

Several recent technological advancements such as cloud computing make it easier to address the hardware and infrastructure aspects of a multiplayer online game project; other areas still require substantial investment of time and effort, namely, writing the actual server-side code. This last part can easily become a full-time job, depending upon how rich the online experience needs to be. Also consider that some of the best iPhone games in existence were written by very small development teams, sometimes consisting of just one person. The aim of our platform is to make it easier for developers to concentrate on what they do best - create fun, addictive, good looking games. It also enables us to spend time doing what we love - writing code that helps others be successful. Everybody benefits.

Great, another technology to learn... 

We hear you. The premise of our platform is simple: you implement the essential logic of your game and we take care of the rest. In order to accomplish this, we are using some of the most common technologies out there and trying to stay away from unnecessarily reinventing the wheel. Of course, nothing happens by magic (with rare exceptions), which means that you will have to learn a thing or two along the way. But the vast majority of your time will be spent thinking about how your game interacts with the players and vice versa, as opposed to worrying about how to handle TCP/IP timeouts or dealing with message queue worker threads and message processing synchronization logic. (If you actually like doing these last bits, we have a lot in common. Drop us a line.)

Does it cost anything?

Yes it does. We are offering introductory pricing for the first group of developers that are using the product - it's a one-time charge of several cents per each copy of your application that gets sold (for paid apps). Standard pricing will be based on a percentage of revenue, tiered according to number of downloads. Please contact us for exact details.

It's free to try!

Our SDK can be downloaded free of charge - it doesn't cost anything to try the technology and decide whether it adequately addresses your needs.

How does it actually work?

Good question! If you want more technical details, there is more information here.

Cool, can I participate?

Absolutely! All you need to do to start playing with this technology is create an account on our Developer Site to download the SDK and access the documentation. If you have any questions, give us a shout: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it