Adventures in Symfony2 - Building an MMO-RPG

Awesome presentation. Awesome story.

Thanks.

Excellent talk. Margaret has got to be one of the livest speakers I've ever seen. Her tales of how the game came from a set of conceptual ideas into an actual thing, detailing mistakes, misconceptions, and lessons learned made the talk very entertaining and informative.

This talk didn't really seem to decide what it wanted to be: it could have been a technical how-to with symfony, or it could have been a more general talk just detailing the path you walked down, or it could have been a discussion on the particulars of MMORPGs and the specific domain problems they have and strategies for solving that.

As it stood it sort of tried to do all of them without fully committing to or fleshing out any of them. My interpretation of the abstract led me to think it would be about the specifics of building an MMO and the problems that came to light. Maybe database locking? Race conditions? Concurrency control? Uptime? Those sorts of things. The talk sort of glossed over the actual game implementation decisions and instead talked about the process of learning symfony. Especially detailing how doctrine annotations work, the syntax of symfony commands, etc. those all seemed like irrelevant details that were spotlighted.

Whether this was a talk problem or an abstract problem I'm not sure, but I felt a huge disconnect between what I thought I was going to sit in on, and what was actually presented.

Well done Margaret. Unlike the commenter before me I had no preconception about where your talk was coming from, and given that I was pleasantly surprised to hear you talk about your missteps, and the actions you took to correct them.

That said, this story likely doesn't need any direct connection to the underlaying framework (though I loved seeing your slide about the homespun delayed event handler). You could cut the bulk of that out of the talk since you have plenty of material on the game itself. This is at best me being nit picky as the core of your talk was the narrative behind it, and your ability to put yourself out there as someone any developer could relate to.

I really enjoyed this talk! It broke down making a video game, something that I wanted to do but always felt intimidated by, into a something feasible. Also, I felt that there was a good balance between the technical and nontechnical problems of making a game. Hearing about the development of the game’s design and the unexpected problems that could arise (the perils of user testing!) was really informative and interesting.