There haven't been many updates on PokerRPG, BC Wars, or this blog for much of this month, but that is for two main reasons. The first of which is that I started a new project that I've been alluding to for the past month or two (if you missed my hints, it isn't a new game as you are about to find out). The other reason is that in conjunction with this new project, I've been learning about a lot of great new technologies to really improve both games and anything in the future.

One of these new technologies isn't really anything new at all, but simply a new way of hosting the network. Yes, I'm going with the now cliched term of the "cloud." This new project will be the first I've done in the cloud as apposed to running on its own dedicated box. This allows for fast horizontal scaling to meet the (hopefully) quickly accelerating demands While both PokerRPG and BC Wars will remain on their own boxes for the time being, depending on how successful this new project's deployment is, they could be making the jump as well.

Another new technology is one that I have already written about: NoSQL. In this case I am using MongoDB to power the backend of the new project. While both games use MySQL as their primary storage engines, it is quite possible that a transition could be underway later in the year (and even more likely a transition to Node.js, but that is a topic for another day).

There are several other topics that I have invested a lot of time and energy research and implementing into this new project that will eventually trickle their way down to the games. Some of these include content delivery networks (CDN). To be more exact, CloudFlare is offering a pretty impressive product that currently does some of the heavy lifting for BC Wars, but that role will grow and expand to PokerrPG over time. Anyway, before this post gets too long, I'll cut it off here and write later on about other new technologies I'm dabbling in.

Now, onto the meat of this post, the new project. Like I said, this new project isn't a new game, but rather a product that goes hand-in-hand with the other properties of GoldFire Studios. The name of this new project is Leet Media and it will be the easiest and most effective way to monetize and grow a web-based game's user-base. Leet Media is currently in private beta testing, but if you own any sort of gaming related site and are interested in becoming a publisher and/or advertiser, click here to get on the list. I'll be posting again within the next few weeks with more details on the launch.

The current state of the advertising market for web-based games has essentially forced my hand on this project. I've been trying for months to effectively advertise PokerRPG and BC Wars, with all attempts ultimately being wasted funds that could have gone to better use. I didn't want to take away time from working on either of the games, but I also knew that it was important to have a good level of players on those games for them to be wholly enjoyable.

Be looking for the launch announcement within the next few weeks (or enter your e-mail on Leet Media to be notified), and get ready for new players and new features all around!