Business Tour
About the project
Business Tour is an online strategy game based on one of the most popular board games in the world. It is played by over 340,000 users every month. 8floor approached us with a request to support, expand and port this application to various platforms.
Task
The development team faced serious challenges while working on the project, the main one being the tightly coupled source code, which required very careful handling. Adding new functionality and fixing bugs required thoughtfulness so as not to disrupt the operation of other parts of the system.
Before the project was transferred to us for operation, several teams were working on it, so the project had duplicate functionality, parallel class hierarchies that do the same work.
The transferred project does not have its own server, but uses several ready-made batch server solutions: peer-to-peer realtime multiplayer on Photon and Playfab. This makes the application vulnerable to fraudsters.
At the initial stage, the project completely lacked CI, and the assembly of builds was carried out manually, which took a lot of time and effort.
The project inherited outdated and no longer supported GAF animations, which were not optimal and significantly increased the size of the final build.
Results
Thanks to extensive experience in refactoring, the development team has learned to accurately and quickly identify the right places to make changes in highly complex code.
The development team successfully combats the problem of cheaters in the game using proven anti-cheat libraries and best practices for combating cheaters in games.
We are currently using a proven CI/CD solution, with the help of which regular runs of Unit tests, data validations and assemblies of current builds for several platforms are configured: Steam, AppStore and GooglePlay.
Thanks to the high competencies of the artists in the project, outdated GAF animations were replaced with smooth and eye-pleasing skeletal Spine animations, which also allowed us to significantly optimize the size of the final build.
The development team has made significant efforts, including:
- rewriting particularly complex and confusing sections of the source code
- unit tests and validation of game data
- delivery of new content and builds now occurs with minimal involvement of developers
To optimize the budget, the development team has reduced the number of requests to the server, as well as the volume of stored data.
Summary
Thanks to our experience, responsibility and careful attitude to the legacy code, the project can develop and make a profit, and players can enjoy constant updates of game skins, a redesigned and more convenient UI.
The project is released on 5 platforms: Android, iOS, Steam Windows, Steam MacOS, Nintendo Switch, where it has consistently good ratings.
The monthly online is 340 thousand users.
