Facebook Card Game? Which architecture?

Question

I am developing a Facebook Card Game for my thesis and i am wondering which architecture fits best?

I am going to develop the game using Silverlight + ASP.NET.

On the one side the game should contain player vs. player card games.

On the other there will be also a lot of contant similar to Mafia Wars(or any other game like that) where you just interact with the server (incl. database)

I read a lot about ASP.NET MVC, Silverlight MVVM and that stuff. But what fits best for a game like that?

Also i am not sure if i should go with Silverlight 4 already?

I don't want to start the wrong way.

I really appreciate your help.

Answer 1

I would choose a rich media architecture that you are familiar with. A card game can (and has) been done in just about every client + server architecture that exists.

However, here are some considerations:

• The Facebook platform has a rich developer history with PHP, not to mention a decently vetted API library in PHP5.

• Choose your rich media options carefully if you are concerned about platform support. Flash has a much deeper user install base than silverlight. If you are concerned about IPad support, go with HTML+CSS and use a good JS toolkit like JQuery.

• Any decent Facebook game that has a large amount of traffic will need an object caching strategy. Choose a server architecture that has one natively, supports one, or integrates with one (like memcached)