Now something of a GDC fixture - this being his third consecutive talk - this year the subject for Vijay Thakkar was 'Building and growing a games on the top of the chart'.

It's something he knows plenty about, given that as CTO of Zynga with Friends, he's worked on games such as Words With Friends, Hanging With Friends and Scramble With Friends.

Across all titles and platforms, the studio is supporting 15 unique titles on iOS, Android and Facebook.

Hammers and nails

"The lines between the games we're working on across the industry are becoming blurred; from the way we make them and the features we include," Thakkar said.

Indeed, the core team to Words With Friends and the studio's first game Chess With Friends previously worked on triple-A PC and console games at Ensemble Studios.

However, when the company (then called Newtoy) started out, it didn't rely on its previously technology expertise - C++ for clients and C# for servers. Instead, it switched to Objective C and Ruby on Rails.

"Use the right tools for the job," Thakkar argued.

Love letters

As the company released more games, it realised community features surrounding games are as important as the games themselves.

"The ability to talk to your players is vital, but you also have to educate your players what to expect from these communication channels," Thakkar said.

This includes the level of mundane messages such as push notification

"We ask ourselves 'Is this push notification beloved?'" Thakkar explained.

Similarly, over time, Zynga With Friends realised that in many occasions, the presentation of an error message can be as much of a problem as the error itself.

For example, instead of popping up a full screen error message when a game got out of sync, it now lets people play the game, with the resync happening in the background.

Resyncing was an issue, but overtly telling players the game wasn't synched caused the majority of problems with respect to user reviews and feedback especially.

Not from scratch

When it came to porting Words With Friends from iOS to Android, the company hired an Android expert, but instead of doing a 'clean slate' rewrite, they decided to port the Objective C code to Java line-by-line.

"Doing it this way, meant there was a lot of collaboration between the code bases and we keep our coding teams more productive," Thakkar said.

Adding to this point, he argued that developers should always focus on code that works, something he called functional code.

"When you have the time, then make it maintainable code," he said. "If you ship a game with beautiful code, you have failed. We don't need beautiful code, we need beautiful products."

Not by the rules

One issue arising from this, once the studio integrated all its code into a centralised platform, it wasn't sure whether the look and feel of things as prosaic as button position and functionality should be handled centrally or on a per team basis.

Even though it potentially added some inconsistencies across the Words With... games, eventually it decided to let the game teams have the freedom.

"Minimise anything that stifles innovation," Thakkar stated.