Alegrium

An established presence in mobile games development, this month Alegrium celebrates 11 years since their founding.

The Indonesia based studio released their first title, Icon Pop Quiz, in 2012 and have steadily expanded their catalog in the idle games space since, racking up tens of millions of downloads in the process.

Now part of Lion Studios, Alegrium are looking to expand their reach across global markets and into mid-core, casual titles.

Development at Alegrium

Alegrium are a team of 50+, with over 70% of those directly working in the game development process (as developers, designers, artists, etc.). We spoke with Ernes Budiman, Technical Lead at Alegrium, to learn more about their approach to building games and how their experience led them to move development to Nakama.

Operating for more than a decade, Alegrium have seen the game server landscape grow and change over time, and have experience with multiple solutions. Prior to starting to develop with Nakama, Alegrium used PlayFab for cloud save functionality and Firebase for their custom cloud functions. Beyond the inherent complexity and cost of using multiple provides, Ernes and his team also found this solution “difficult to debug and to run locally,” causing unnecessary delay and frustration.

Speaking of the search for an alternative, Ernes explains:

“We wanted something with a lot of 'building blocks' just available built-in, where we could just play with those blocks right away to build what we wanted. We found that Nakama suited these needs very well.”

Working with Nakama

Describing Nakama as “democratizing backend development,” Ernes and his team have been actively developing with Nakama for a year. Nearly all features they have needed in building their newest title have been readily available, simplifying their development process and allowing more time to focus on the game experience and social features.

For their latest title, Alegrium have taken advantage of nearly all the social features built-in to Nakama including chat, groups, leaderboards, and tournaments.

With this new title currently in soft launch, and aiming for a global launch later this year, Ernes reports impressive results from the addition of these social features, doubling their retention rate when users belong to groups/clans (40% vs. 20%).

Speaking about future plans at Alegrium, Ernes says “We’ll be using Nakama for all our upcoming projects with a lot of online, social game features.”