Applications for productive internal use
Application development
It is not immediately obvious from the outside, but the tool department represents an exciting and varied workplace within the company as it develops applications for many extremely important company processes. It juggles with the enormous data quantities generated by over 115 million players every day. Whether we are running a comprehensive ticket system for player support or various marketing applications for partner support – the software systems must be stable and scalable. The reliability and reusability of central, high-capacity and highly-available game services such as login, registration, or activation services allow other departments to concentrate on their core tasks.
The applications communicate with each other and with games via XML-RPC-based interfaces that are future oriented but still easy to integrate. The use of industry standards when exchanging data is just as important as the use of the latest, modern development processes (Scrum, Kanban), development methods (continuous integration, clean code, continuous deployment) and development tools (Zend Studio, Ant, Liquibase, Jenkins, Doxygen, Selenium, Confluence, Jira uvm.), as well as future-oriented frameworks (ExtJS, Zend Framework, Doctrine). Hacks and similar superficial solutions are taboo, because clean, object-oriented development using the current PHP version is vital in order to develop stable, easy-to-maintain and easy-to-expand software. Our large, well-organized, open and targeted team also uses the latest Web technologies with relational and non-relational databases (MySQL/InnoDB, MongoDB) to make wide-ranging applications reliably available to all the relevant departments in the company.
A separate research and development department (R&D Team) also engages with the latest trends in Web technologies in order to support future developments with empirical values and visionary methods. It is particularly committed to investigating the practical opportunities of HTML 5 and CSS 3 in the frontend. The performance of new technologies under stressed conditions plays an important role, as does cross-platform usability. But the latest trends are also assessed in terms of the backend – e.g. Node.js & NoSQL databases, as well as algorithms, structures and protocols for saving or transferring large data quantities. This evaluation work developed the prototype ORC, for example, which presents a fully-playable real-time experience in the browser completely in Java Script, with no download whatsoever.
Travian Games is also heavily committed to promoting and developing new talent and has been training Chamber of Commerce and Industry-recognized IT specialists for several years now. To date, all trainees who have passed the exams have gone on to take positions with the company. During their three-year education, trainees get to work in almost all areas of the company, allowing them to experience first hand the many stages of product development including sales. This provides them with a full overview of the company’s work. Technical expertise is also promoted. In one of the growing sectors of the entertainment industry, the job therefore represents security as well as a great deal of variety!