Client and product
Choosly is a game designed for mobile phones, where you have to put yourself in the shoes of the player, guess their thoughts, and make a rough assumption about what they will favour. While it may not seem like a complex task at first, with the right questions, it can get really challenging, as confirmed by the first real user tests, since the app is already running in the beta version.
The gameplay is simple: you are given two pictures and you have to decide and choose one of them within a short time. There are several possible ways to play, you either have to choose the majority or the minority will. If you choose the right one, you can win points, which can be used to start climbing the ranking ladder.
The story doesn't stop there, the game is part of a product set that we'll tell you more about soon. We're working with the company Planet of the Apps on the implementation, they are bringing the products together coherently and designing the interfaces, while we are doing the implementation of each product.
Challenges
Since we are not talking about just one product in the system, it is technologically an exciting task to create a system in which certain data and elements are interchangeable, but the applications have a life on their own. This difficulty can only be overcome through detailed planning and continuous communication.
The game modes are based on selecting images on the fly, so a lot of emphases had to be put on optimising the queries and their storage in memory. There should be no loading time between two images, meanwhile, we don't want the product to "think" a lot at the beginning of the game either. We built a custom solution for this, so it is continuously synchronized, and we also leveraged the power of socket-based communication.
Custom Solutions
Connected, but still custom account management
There is the possibility to create a unique authentication across multiple products, which can be decoupled on demand, giving the flexibility to accommodate future applications. In addition, the simplicity of log-in has been solved with a pin solution sent by email.
Socket-based lightning-fast communication
No one wants to wait around when the heat of the game gets to them. Thanks to our optimisation efforts, images are delivered to your phone at lightning speed, leaving you free to only focus on the selection.
Cross-platform in-app purchases
We built an integrated solution that can manage in-app purchases across multiple platforms, giving users more manageable and meaningful insights.
Cross-platform solution for the fast market entry
While developing the product, we kept in mind that, in the future, our client plans to develop a web-based solution as well, so we chose a technology where the code base can be reused in a browser-based solution too, thus reducing the cost of the implementation and the time to product launch.
