Challenges & Goals
WildCard Games released Ultimate Cribbage in 2015, and they came to us so we’d freshen it up a bit and make sure more new players discovered the game & stayed to play it.
After throughout analysis, we’ve discovered that
- Ultimate Cribbage had a lot of legacy code that needed to be updated/rewritten
- The UI and features of the game needed an update and do-over to be more clear, readable, and attractive for players
- All these UI improvements/new mechanics and features will have to be built in a data-based way
The ultimate goal of our collaboration was to apply our LiveOps services to improve Ultimate Cribbage’s onboarding funnel, increase early retention levels, and optimize ads monetization.
On one hand, the siloed codebase written by multiple teams since the game’s release meant achieving these goals will be pretty difficult. On other hand, because Ultimate Cribbage has already been released and we — and WildCard Games as a game’s publisher — had access to players’ analytics over the years, building up UI/gameplay enchantment based on the data wasn’t that challenging.
Value
While the client — being a publisher and a product pioneer in the collaboration — has been taking care of marketing and promoting the new version, we’ve provided all game engineering & designing capabilities we could.
We improved dozens of design aspects of the game that boosted the game’s target metrics, created new features, and, in that way, helped the client achieve their goals. After our LiveOps collaboration, the games hit 1M downloads in Play Store, and reviews in both Android and iOS stores praised its UI, design, and reward mechanics we’ve implemented and/or polished.
Solutions & Expertise
Our team easily integrated with Wildcard Games’ production process, strengthening & boosting stages of it where they lacked expertise (re: engineering, Unity, QA, and other technical things). Because the LiveOps process needed to be data-driven, we maintained close collaboration with the client’s team, e.g. our QA testers and Unity devs worked in a tight loop with the client’s analytics to track how players like various new content and game improvements.
Overall, we worked on the project for a year and a half, and that was an enjoyable experience for both the client and iLogos. After taking care of Ultimate Cribbage, we started helping the client with a new game — Ultimate Hearts
