By Neil Vidyarthi on June 25, 2010 2:10 PM

Social Developer Summit Preview: Luke Rajlich of FarmVille Discusses Scalability, Surprises

farmvillelukelogo In preparation for next week’s Social Developer Summit, we had a chance to do a Q&A session with one of our featured speakers, Luke Rajlich, Architect Engineer with Zynga’s FarmVille team. He discusses how his previous company, MyMiniLife, was acquired and integrated into FarmVille, how to deal with the massive scaling necessary on a game like FarmVille, and the biggest surprise he encountered over the last year. Read the interview below.

If you haven’t signed up for the Social Developer Summit yet, please click the link below and head over to sign up today.

Now, on to the Q&A with Luke Rajlich from Zynga.

1) Farmville has the most traffic load of any game available on Facebook (and ostensibly is one of the biggest on the web). What has been the biggest challenge as an architect engineer on such a big project?

The biggest challenge has been to keep up with the growth of the game. With the size of the game now, there are few if any canned solutions for problems we face. Thus, we have to understand deeply the nature of the problem we are facing in order to build a solution that fixes it.

2) Farmville uses technology from MyMiniLife, which you founded. Can you tell us about the difficulty of integrating the old technology into this new game?

FarmVille, from the start, was a collection of several technologies, including MyMiniLife. We were unique in our development in that we combined technology from MyMiniLife and existing Zynga games. We initially had to piece everything together nicely, which required we be specific about how the various pieces would fit together. Since the tech pulled from each source was rather non-overlapping, so this was mainly a bit of integration work.

3) What were some of the biggest surprises you encountered as FarmVille began to explode in popularity?

The biggest surprise was how we passed some of the most iconic games (PacMan, Tetris, Sims) in terms of players in such a short time. We are now the most played game ever, which is crazy to think about.

4) What is one thing you would have done differently if you could go back in time and scale again?

Scaling a large game like FarmVille is a continuous learning experience. As such, I’ve learned a ton through the process and I can’t say there is anything I would rather not have done. We’ve overcome major scaling hurdles and we have built a massive franchise. It has been a truly amazing experience.