The documentation we had to make to present ULUland as our thesis took as a lot of time, as you can imagine. And, well, we are reusing it to show you the most interesting parts.

The introduction was the part that we knew everyone was going to read, so we made an effort. We must have done it quite well because many people have told us they like it a lot… Let’s see what you think:

The project, at a glance

The Context

The web is the future.

During the last decade, the world of computers has changed completely due to the fast evolution of the biggest and most efficient communications network ever created: Internet. This evolution is blurring the edge between the classic desktop applications and the modern web, social applications. Today, there are not many reasons to develop software which does not work on this global operating system, that has almost 1500 millions of users all over the world and that is growing at a fast pace.

This is the context of our project, and we face it with the ambitious aim of innovate and stand out in this huce sea of applications that want the same.

The Idea

Since the moment in which the broadband connections made it possible, flash games portals have been extremely succesful. According to the latest data (year 2008) more than 25% of internet users play in this portals all over the world, which means that more than 300 million people. Undoubtely, this is a wide market.

On the other hand, a new kind of web applications has appeared in these last years: The social networks. The common feature of these networks is that they allow their users to establish relationships, getting to keep in touch with a lot of people.

After the horizontal social networks appeared, some new networks are focusing in one single group of users with something in common. These are the vertical social networks, and a lot of people state that these will get more popular that the horizontal ones.

A successful fusion

Knowing this, the idea of the project appeared; to combine these two successful formulas. The project consists, basically, of a flash games portal with a vertical social network for the players of the games.

Although it’s a very innovative idea, it has been easy to precise this idea… Everything seemed to fit perfectly.

Features from the flash games portals:

• Great variety of games periodically updated
• Classification of games in categories
• Games search

Features from the vertical social networks

• Frienship relationships between the users
• Communication between the users
• Groups
• Customizable character
• Creation of contents (comments, scores, etc…)

In addition, we quickly discovered that we could add a lot of innovative and attractive new features:

• High-Scores system for the games
• Competitions between the players
• Logs of game statistics
• Personalized recommendations of games

Al these features are enough theirself to make ULUland an innovative project because they create a better gaming experience for the users. But, in addition to that, after the first month of work, we came up with a new idea that fits perfectly our social and open filosophy, and makes this project become a pioneer in this field:

The developers can add their own games to the portal

The same as in YouTube, but with games.

All of the classic flash games portals worked more or less the same: The games were added by the site admins manually. The best of them had a web form or an email address so that the developers could send their games to be published, only if the site owners wanted.

This project has been developed in such a way that it allows the flash game developers to upload their creations in an extremely easy way, avoiding the disturbing process that is compulsory in other portals.

In addition, we have developed an open API so that the games can communicate with the system, get access to some information of the players, send or get data such as high scores…

There are only a few other portals that allow this.

The development

The development of this project has been very similar to a trip: We started one year ago approximately, almost without experience in web development, but with a lot of motivation and knowing that we were in the right path, developing something that could work in the real world.

At first, we used Ruby On Rails. At that moment we were studying the different options, and we had a lot of curiosity about this framework. However, we soon discovered that it had some issues.

Slightly disappointed we switched to PHP, without any framework. We tried this option for a few weeks, but we had liked the Ruby on Rails phylosophy and we discovered symfony, that a lot of people calls “The Rais for PHP”.

We soon noticed that this had been an excelent decission. The documentation was great and complete, the community huce and the framework was reliable and robust. Anyway, we needed a few time to get to master all the features of this technology.

A real project

From the beginning, one of the main motivations to spend this effort in the project was that we believed in this project, we knew it coud become a reality, successful and profitable.

We confirmed that this was not an illusion when the project was selected among more than 70 projects to participate in the SeedRocket initiative, a campus for young entrepeneurs organised by 14 important spanish entrepeneurs.