Daffodil helps Valor to re-engineer their battle-centric third-person shooter game, resulting in 46% increase in sessions

Team Daffodil started by auditing the code-base of their existing solution to understand the part of code that can be used in the new application. As the client did not possess the documentation of the codebase, the developers had to thoroughly go through the code to understand the kind of features and functionalities of the application.Since the former application was built on an outdated technology, it was necessary to refine the usable part of the code before integrating it with the newer one. As much as 25% of the code was reused in developing the new application, which resulted in significant savings in time, cost and development efforts.

Ruby on Rails (RoR) was used as the core backend technology to build the application as it contains many ready to use plugins and modules, which allowed the developers not to waste time writing boilerplate code. This was specifically used to compensate for the time invested in studying the application code. The consistent nature of RoR that allows developers to follow standardized file storage and programming conventions to keep the project structured and readable also resulted in saving a substantial amount of development time.

The gaming engine was developed using Unity 2D. The graphics of the gaming application were also extensively improved by using Unity 2D, as high-quality audio and visual effects are supported by the engine that eases the game development. The visuals were adaptable on every screen and device without any distortion or compromise with the image quality.

It also helped resolve various production issues that the existing application was facing. Debugging and tweaking became easier because all the game variables were displayed during gameplay, which in turn allowed the developers to debug the process at runtime.The use of agile methodology enabled speedy prototyping and constant releases, which in turn sped-up the game development process.

To solve the challenge of load balancing, our developers optimized the RoR code in order to get more out of existing server resources. Another way used to solve the issue was to re-writing computationally intensive tasks in a low-level language, such as C++. Due to low concurrency support because of the Matz Ruby Interpreter (MRI), low-level programming languages prove to be better for computation compared to Ruby on Rails.  Few game features that were incorporated in the application were:

Multiple Game Modes: This feature allows users to choose among multiple gaming modes to ensure user engagement. Each mode has a different story line to avoid predictability. 

Tournament of Champions: Users can become a part of real-time gaming tournaments on the application. The tournaments offer seamless user experience with amazing graphic quality.

Titles: Players can win titles and premium items through superior play. This feature helps in user retention as players tend to fight for adding more titles to their profile.