Game Development · Case Dissection. Browse How Forager's 5,000 Instances Almost Sank Performance — and the Culling Fix, How Fall Guys' Launch Servers Collapsed Under 120,000 Players — and the Switch That Bought Time, with requirements, routes and walkthrough steps.
Forager can run 5,000 instances at once, and lead programmer Gabe 'lazyeye' Weiner was hired to make that playable. Every instance was justified, so the fix was not fewer objects: cheaper representations where possible, cheaper checks first, work spread across frames, and a culling system that deactivates what the player cannot see — plus a second system to repair the 500-plus code calls the culling broke.
Fall Guys launched on August 4, 2020, free on PlayStation Plus, and more than 120,000 players connected at once — past Mediatonic's highest forecast for the whole day. Matchmaking was switched off for 30 minutes so servers could be beefed up, the game was review-bombed as a 'connection error simulator', and fans then positive-bombed it back to Mostly Positive. The lessons: forecast for your marketing, not your beta, and build the off-switch before launch day.
