Catan Inspired Game, Playable on Mobile and Web

Landover: It’s All About Strategy

Landover is a video game inspired by Settlers of Catan and its expansion packs, Cities & Knights and Seafarers. The game improves upon Catan through simpler mechanics and taking advantage of being a fully digital product while staying true to the overall concept, adapted to be a mobile and web-friendly game.

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About the Game

The game is for 1 to 4 players competing for the most Victory Points. The game is played on a variety of maps, each one calling for different strategies. You can choose to play custom games on user-created maps with all your friends or play ranked games against random opponents to see how well you stack up against the competition.

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The game starts with each player placing one village and one city on the board. Players then take turns rolling the dice, gathering resources, and building up their colonies. Players must choose between expanding quickly, upgrading their technology & culture, or fortifying their military. If you expand your empire too quickly, your cities are in danger of being raided by other players or destroyed by barbarians.

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Challenge

The client wanted to build a cross-platform game that could work on Android and iOS devices, as well as web browsers. The game needed to support real-time updates, native performance, and provide the same experience for multiple devices running the game.

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Flutter was used for the front-end of the application, developing interfaces that could adapt to both web and mobile devices.

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And, for the backend Firebase was used -- leveraging its out-of-the-box real-time capabilities, and using cloud functions to implement the logic behind the game behavior and state.

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The Firebase services that used were:

Auth, Firestore, Cloud Functions, App Distribution, Hosting, Remote Config, Dynamic Links and Analytics.

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Construction

The biggest challenge was architecting the whole backend of the app, which has been tested thoroughly and needed to manage the source of truth for each instance of the game.‍

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Organization

The team developed strong ownership of the project using Kanban boards to organize the different stages, analyze and schedule the timeframes, and distribute each assignment to their responsible owners. As a staff augmentation team, this is an extra effort besides all the hard technical work the developer's team put their hands on.

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Innovation

This was the first time the team developed a videogame using Flutter, so the whole process was an unexplored area and included creating one codebase for multiple devices with different dimensions and providing the same level of user experience in all of them.

Solution

Testing

The kickoff of the working process took place by testing each starting point of the game and making it work effectively. Then the team added new features and started working on the web version.

Backend

The backend development was substantial due to the complex, large data that needed to be architected and organized. TypeScript and Node were the tools used in this instance. 

Launching

An agile version was released to production as an open beta (0.1) to get the feedback of people who wanted to test it and work on the features and functions to accomplish what Landover is today.

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‍Impact

Landover is one of the first of few video games developed on Flutter. Its mobile and web version allows players to subscribe to premium and competitive games with exclusive player rankings. Landover assures an exciting and competitive adventure achieving +19000 monthly players.

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Having such an impact, the build team won a grant from the Uruguayan Government to participate in the biggest game developers' conference in the world ‘Game Developers Conference’ (GDC) in California, to exhibit and show how to play the game. 

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More Information

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