Love Story
- Platforms: Android and iOS
- Role: Unity Developer
- Technologies: Unity, Firebase, Xcode, Android Studio
- Duration of my involvement: 2.5 years – from the initial idea, well into LiveOps (mid-2019 – early 2022)
- Team – Varied in size: 3-12 developers, 10 writers, 5-10 artists, 1 game manager
Company: Webelinx Games
Game Features
- Storytelling gameplay with short cinematics and choices that branch the story
- Configurable main menu and gameplay parameters using RemoteConfig
- Configurable live events and episode releases through RemoteConfig
- Dynamic asset loading with assets that can be individually updated server-side
- Simple per-story main character customization at fixed moments in the story
- Player progress saving (current episode, customization, choices) for each story
- In-app purchases
My Contributions
- Identifying and defining tasks for the team to work on and validating the finished work afterwards
- Recommending, implementing and supporting a Git branching model for ~50 contributors across different disciplines
- Implementing and incrementally releasing asset caching using Cloudflare in coordination with the CTO
- Fixing and refactoring a faulty Unity editor module for story customization
- Implementing A/B testing capabilities for game settings and features
- Aggregating technical ANR data and extracting meaningful conclusions
- Implementing a currency system for tickets and gems
Challenges and Solutions
- Google Play was reporting a big number of ANRs, but gave no specific data on why it was happening
- Used BigQuery to extract the game screens where the ANRs happened and summarized the findings in a document for the rest of the team
- Tracked releases and ANR rate over time to try and pinpoint their cause to specific features
- The team was using a single-branch Git model, creating technical problems for the content teams when the development team was collaborating on an unfinished feature
- Recommended that all content contributors use a “content” branch, and the functionality contributors use a “develop” branch, which are merged periodically, taking into account the state of the develop branch
- Oversaw this change and adjusted the Git model as needed
- The main game loop code was overly complex, using recursion and flags to traverse the story, making any change difficult due to the complexity of the method
- Defined the expected behaviour and unit tests and delegated the task to the dev team. After implementation, the system was easy to understand and to modify