Farm Blast from Narcade

Heroic Labs serves a globally distributed suite of game development studios, helping teams of any size and aspiration to grow and scale their games. Here we’ll share the story of Narcade, a growing Turkish studio, moving their titles from PlayFab to Nakama and Heroic Cloud as they expanded their game features and grew their user base.

About Narcade

Founded in 2011, Istanbul-based Narcade initially developed web games, distributed solely via the company website, with an eye towards the mobile games market. In this transition they focused on Puzzle Casual games and have experienced continued growth and success. Narcade is now a 50+ member studio with multiple successful titles, Farm Blast among them, serving a 250,000+ daily active user base across Android and iOS.

Farm Blast

Farm Blast is a casual puzzle game where players solve puzzles by popping bubbles, saving animals and creating their farm in the process.

Launched in May 2020, Farm Blast has received additional development and features since, and continues to expand its user base and popularity.

With 30K+ daily active users, Narcade looks to build on the success of Farm Blast to date with the implementation of several new features based around the flexibility of Nakama’s social gaming APIs.

Moving to Heroic Cloud

When moving into mobile gaming, Narcade began working with PlayFab, utilizing the platform for saving and loading their user data. Over the next five years, Narcade grew its library of games, and their backend needs grew accordingly.

With this growth, pain points in their use of PlayFab become more apparent. The consumption based pricing and default server API limits (not to exceed 1,000 calls every 10 seconds) meant that implementing all their desired social features would require custom limits, meaning an enterprise contract and dramatically increased costs. To avoid these skyrocketing costs and keep their growing games viable, Narcade took the drastic step of removing already developed features from their games.

For the continued growth and development of Farm Blast, Narcade needed a backend provider that gave them the ability to scale their game without prohibitive costs and rate limits. For the next stage of development they chose Nakama on the Heroic Cloud.

Freed from a prohibitive consumption based pricing model, and using Nakama’s powerful and flexible APIs, Narcade have moved beyond only saving and loading user data and are now utilizing User Accounts, Storage Engine, Groups, and Realtime Chat features. With the ease of implementation and shortened development time, a multiplayer feature is now also in the works.

As a growing, ambitious studio, originally operating with no backend engineer on the team, Narcade seeks simplicity of use in their backend provider. When it comes to using Nakama, Umur Alturk, Game Developer at Narcade, says:

“Our development time for new features has been significantly reduced since moving to Nakama, letting us get new features to our users faster than ever. Getting up to speed was simple, with Nakama things just work, and they make sense.”

Following the successful migration experience to Heroic Cloud for Farm Blast, Narcade will look to move their other titles onto Nakama as well.