Alienware Arena was one of those projects that was a lot of fun to work on. Doing work inside the video game industry is always fun for me, especially since I enjoy a good video game now and then.
The requirements for Alienware Arena were pretty vast, and our team was able to accomplish all of them. It was built on top of CEVO’s Tournament Engine (CTE) by myself, Eric Ping, and Mike Stevens. In three months time we were able to build a completely customized experience for Dell & their Alienware Marketing team. We started work on Alienware Arena in 2009, and it has been up and running since.
The basic goal and purpose was for Dell to be able to engage their current and potential future customers with things they liked to do. The Alienware Arena site was built to be able to host online events, such as tournaments, or beta key giveaways. So a group a friends could form a team and compete with other teams around the nation, and even world. They could win prizes and awards. They could talk about the game and their favorite topics on the forums, and interact with their friends on Alienware Arena.
Design
Concept Design
The design was one of the most challenging aspects. Dell wanted the site to look and feel just like the original Alienware website. However, the marketing team didn’t have any of the original photoshop files to aid in the design. So we had to recreate the exact look and feel as Alienware.com from scratch. However, it worked great, and the design was a success and Dell was very happy.
Over time the design has had to change due to requirements of the site growing. Now, the site has hosted over 80 online events and competitions. Hundreds of thousands of gamers use it to participate in events.
Development
Custom Forums
Using some existing code from CEVO, and a new framework (codenamed XMSP) I had co-authored with Eric Ping, we built the entire Alienware Arena system. Some of the features the system included were:
- Member Profiles
- Integrated Forums
- Experience/Rewards System
- Tournament Management System
- Complete Event Management
- Dynamic Brackets
- Complete Regional and Language Control
- Friends System
- Custom Backgrounds
- News, Stories, and Blog System
- 100% controllable from a secure staff panel.
Site Localization
Those are some of the awesome features we built for Dell in Alienware Arena. For game matches, players could coordinate and connect to their games through the CEVO Match Network (CMN), which is a windows desktop client. It communicates with our servers through our APIs, and provides up-to-the-second information about the matches being played to the staff.
A frequently overlooked feature I’ve found in my years of doing web development work is a control panel for a given website. Many times clients want an amazing website, and haven’t given any thought to how it will be controlled. So for Alienware Arena we used XMSP’s control panel system to build a control panel that litteraly can control 95% of the content on the website. You can quickly look up users, teams, events, news posts, etc and change them, or make new ones. You can control what news appears for which region you are in (since Alienware Arena supports North America, Latin America, Asia, and Europe).
Scaling
Staff Panel
One of the challenges we faced with Alienware Arena was the sudden spikes in traffic. Dell would work out a deal with a game developer to do an exclusive give-a-way, normally with beta keys (keys that give you early access to a new game), and we would experience giant surges in traffic. We would have tens of thousands of users come to the site, sign up, and get a beta key, within a single hour for some of the more popular events.
To handle these massive spikes, we were able to engineer the website to allow for sections of the websites, like a give-a-way, to be segregated to it’s own servers. This way we could increase, double, or even tripple the resources for several hours until the give-a-way is over. It is an excellent example of utilizing cloud technologies. For Alienware Arena we are using Rackspace Cloud.
If you are a custom solution for hosting competitions, feel free to contact me and we can see what we can do for you.
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