These series of guest posts are written by the teams attending the Tetuan Valley Startup School 2011 Spring edition. This post is from the Megades team, formed by Fernando Benito, Joaquín Garzón and David Velayos.

When we made the decision to start working on Famiglia The Game, a multiplatform (mobile and PC) geopositioned massively multiplayer on-line role playing game, we hadn’t a lot of money to spend. So, one of the things we had in mind when we chose the technologies evolved in this project was it cost.

“Famiglia” has three different parts, a server side, a mobile client and a PC client.

The most expensive part is the server side, you must pay hosting or housing for your app. We have evaluated different options:

• Shared server
• Dedicated virtual server
• Dedicated server
• Cloud computing service

Initially we just need a server to deploy and test the application with a reduced number of beta testers, but expect a fast growth in the near future. So, we chose a cloud computing service which offers one of the cheapest initial fees and better scalabity for future requirements.

PHP was our choice as server side programming language, because supports OPP, exits a great number of well tested frameworks, and it’s the cheapest language supported for the main cloud computing services.

When we thought in databases we checked several open source databases, but we chose MySQL, for these reasons:

• It’s offered by a huge number of cloud computing service providers.
• Supports:
  • Unicode (required for internationalization)
  • Stored Procedure Language (required to improve critical features performance and extract complex logic from code)
  • Partitioned tables (required for future growth)
  • Clustered databases (required for future growth)

On the client side we had in mind three main targets: PC (PHP), Android (Java) and iOS (Objective C). To maximize the code reused between platforms we decided to build the game main screen as a web page, which will be showed as a web view in mobile applications and use specific language for each mobile platform only to access to specific platforms as GPS.

All these points were considered to choose the cheapest technologies that supports ours requirements.