The challenge

What if you could combine the rising tension of Tetris with the mental workout of a word tile game? That’s the concept behind Radmule Labs’ new game Letta: piece together words from falling letter tiles before they fill the screen!

Ulas Bilgenoglu, CEO of Radmule Labs, formed the studio in 2013 with a vision for creating games that would bring something new to players:

“As game developers, we want to develop something unique. We don’t want to copy something else just because it is already successful. Instead, our guiding mission is to create something new. We’re excited by different types of mechanics and different types of games.”

That passion for gameplay has guided everything they have done. As a relatively small team, they’ve focused their energy on creating unique player experiences. But with a desire to bring their games to a worldwide audience, they needed to find a back-end partner who could help them scale without needing a full-time ops team.

Why Nakama

Ulas and the Radmule Labs team looked for solutions and quickly discovered that Heroic Labs offered a quality of service they couldn’t find elsewhere:

“Heroic Labs stood out. I liked that they’re a Y Combinator graduate; that’s a mark of quality. We met with them and the team is amazing, basically.”

Not only was Ulas impressed with the Heroic Labs team but it was the flexibility of Nakama as a games server that sealed the decision:

“We knew that we wanted to build a league system but none of the other solutions we considered were flexible enough. Nakama’s leaderboard system gave us the basis of what we needed and, most importantly, Nakama let us build custom plugins so that we could easily extend Nakama’s functionality to achieve what we wanted. Gamesparks and other services were not that flexible.”

In fact, other games back-end providers told Ulas that what he wanted to do was impossible. The Heroic Labs team, however, quickly found a solution.

“I had a chat with Chris and Mo from Heroic Labs that took maybe an hour. They helped us come up with a solution. Then, after that, during development if we got stuck they’d hop in, check the code, and get us a very fast resolution.”

So, how has the experience been for Radmule Labs since they committed to Nakama?

The result

Ultimately, the benefit of using Nakama and working with Heroic Labs comes down to one crucial thing for Ulas:

“I’m a game developer. I should not be building game technology. I need a backend system that will scale up, that will be always be available in the face of heavy load. But that’s a different skill set. And if I spend time on that, I’m not building a game; instead, I’m building game technology.

“So, just as I use Unity to take care of certain things for me, if I use Nakama then I get to concentrate on what I do best and what actually matters for the game.”

Working with Nakama has also made the development process itself easier for Radmule Labs.

“Being open source makes developing with Nakama very easy. All of us have it running on our laptops, it’s also running on our test suite hosted by a public cloud provider, and then our publisher can run Nakama on their own servers. With other game back ends, we just wouldn’t have that flexibility; with them it’s cloud or nothing.”

And when Ulas or his team do get stuck, Heroic Labs have exceeded his expectations in the support they’ve offered.

“Heroic Labs have offered amazing support. When we ask something they always take additional steps to solve the problem and or explain the solution. They’re always very responsive, they move fast, and they relentlessly answer every question, which is amazing if you ask me.

“They even help us with our own modules that are specific to our games. Sometimes they even re-prioritise the roadmap and open APIs that might have been schedules for later release, just so that we can have access to some functionality that we need. Whatever I say about how great they are, it won’t be enough to describe how much they’ve helped us.”

Heroic Labs and Nakama have helped Radmule Labs to focus on building games they love and that scale to a global audience. Learn how you can join Radmule Labs in focusing on delivering gameplay while Nakama gives you a scalable, reliable games backend.