Challenges & Goals
There were, however, several issues to tackle & goals to achieve:
- Shadow Fight Arena had to be a PvP multiplayer. This meant that the development team — which consisted of game developers on ours and on Nekki’s side — had to create gameplay with quick responses and no delays. Responsiveness is essential for PVP fighting games’ success — and we wanted success for Arena.
- With the game having characters who had multiple fighting abilities — and those were characters people remembered from previous games — the animations & graphics had to impress and be cool.
- Expanding on the previous topic: Arena needed excellent graphics and performance — the franchise is famous partially because of its interesting, enchanting combat.
Conceptually, Arena had to be connected to the Shadow Fight series via setting and familiar characters, but remain new and fresh. In collaboration with Nekki, we made (and are still making) everything to make sure it accomplishes this goal and goals above.
Value
Almost all projects where iLogos does team augmentation — when our developers extend the client’s core team — increase the game’s time-to-market.
Because we’ve been collaborating with Nekki for about a decade already, there weren’t any challenges with knowledge transfer or adapting to the pipeline Nekki has used in game development: we knew it really well.
That boosted development speed & efficiency, even more, allowing our team to take on, for instance, the job of making a game high-performing, fast, and responsive and providing more time to get complex animations right.
We also made sure the game looks good and is fast on multiple models of mobile devices so people with old smartphones could enjoy it without issue. Nekki released Shadow Fight Arena in 2020, and since then, the game got pretty high ratings on the Play Market and App Store. From the feedback we’ve received about Arena’s players, it’s pretty clear that a lot of them have been waiting to brawl as characters from the Shadow Fight franchise since the release of SF2 — and they were extremely happy about being able to do that in SFA.
Solutions & Expertise
In collaboration with Nekki, several Unity developers joined their team to aid in working with their future game’s performance capabilities within PvP, multiplayer setup, skills animations, and so on.
A lot of decisions we made as a team were made within that collaboration, for instance: we wanted Unity’s rendering pipeline to give us the combination of the graphic & performance we wanted for the production of a high-load PvP game, so we’ve modified it to fit our needs. Sure, SFA needs a stable Internet connection to play without issue — but, when it connects, it’s both fast and beautiful.
