Welcome to the fifth edition of our ‘Developer Diaries’, keeping you informed about the progress of Reality Clash and the latest updates from our developers. For this update we wanted to focus on the backend technology that drives some of the key features of the videogame.
Nearly every modern mobile videogame will utilise a BaaS (Backend as a Service) to allow the developers to remotely communicate with each other and work on the code. Reality Clash utilises this technology in many ways and we want to explain a few of these to you.
Player Accounts
Every Reality Clash player creates their own unique account, which securely stores all relevant information such as name, user profile, gameplay statistics such as kill/death ratio, as well as weapon purchases, custom configurations and loadout. The cloud profile also ensures player preferences and inventory to be automatically restored if you they devices.
These profiles can also be accessed by the Reality Clash trading platform, so in-game item purchases will automatically show up within the mobile app.
Leaderboards
Comprehensive leaderboards allow us to store the results of in-game fights and as the title grows, highlighting the best local, national and global players to let people see how they compare against their friends (and foes!).
Economy
The in-game economy forms one of the largest parts of the BaaS – it’s where we store all the information regarding weapons and consumables. Weapons in Reality Clash are defined by a large number of parameters to ensure that combat is as realistic and fun as possible and that each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses.
The economy can be updated at any time to add new weapons and items to the videogame without requiring an update of the iOS or Android app itself. This provides a smoother user experience, whilst also allowing us to ensure players are always up to date.
DLC
Each weapon’s models and textures are stored in a compressed downloadable package. This means we can add new weapon assets to the app alongside updates to the economy without re-downloading other weapons that haven’t changed, which reduces the bandwidth that Reality Clash uses.
Cloud Code & Data
It used to be that all the data and code needed to be on the device itself, but now we have the ability run code and access data from the cloud. This feature opens up great opportunities to interact with the community, reward players remotely and support future features such as Clans, Tournaments and Competitions.
Push Notifications
We want to ensure that players never miss anything, so the BaaS allows us to send notifications to devices, such as challenges from other players, updates on new available weapons or new safehouses in your area that may be of interest.
Analytics
The analytics system allows us to track how players are using the title and iterate and, as such, improve the gameplay and user experience. For example, if we notice that players are utilising certain features more than others, we can add new shortcuts to make them more accessible.
A/B Testing
A/B testing allows us to try out new features on different focus groups to see how they’re received before we release them to the entire world. We can add a new feature and then test it with different parameters in different geographical locations, monitoring the feedback and tweaking the gameplay accordingly.
The BaaS allows us to easily balance and improve the title once it is released without having to make players download large updates to the videogame on their devices.
It isn’t the only online technology being used however, as Reality Clash also utilises custom servers that ensure players can easily find opponents to fight and validate combat to make it harder for nefarious players to cheat.
But there will be more about that in a later update…