First Quiz Planet, then 4 Pics 1 Word: Why Lotum doubled down on Nakama

German developer Lotum has had no shortage of success. Recently, the company’s suite of titles – which includes Quiz Planet, 4 Pics 1 Word, and Word Blitz – surpassed one billion downloads in total. That’s quite the major milestone!

Despite doing very well for itself, Lotum has not grown its headcount too much. It employs around 50 members of staff and operates with the motto ‘Small team, big impact’.

But being a leaner operation means it isn’t able to produce everything it needs for its games in-house, so it sought out external help.

The Objective

Lotum wanted to bring its 2018 hit Quiz Planet to Facebook Messenger and Discord.

Doing so would require the company to implement synchronous gameplay, something that it had not tried its hand at before.

In using Nakama, Lotum was able to hit the ground running. Within just six weeks, the studio had brought its hit title to two new platforms: Facebook Messenger and Discord, where it immediately found a huge new audience, with tens of thousands of new users playing the game.

"It was very straightforward. We didn't have to put a huge amount of effort into the technical side of the synchronous gameplay, just our game loop, which was very nice. I really liked being able to develop that quickly using Nakama." - " Grebiel José Ifill Brito, game developer

Software developer Gabriel Terwesten adds: “The SDKs are really intuitive. It’s really easy to get stuff done quickly.”

Doubling Down

Once Lotum had partnered with Heroic Labs for Quiz Planet, the developer used our tech for another one of its hit games, 2013’s 4 Pics 1 Word. This time it was a different problem the team was trying to solve.

“We didn’t need the real-time features that Nakama provides for 4 Pics 1 Word,” Terwesten says. “We mainly looked at Nakama for all the other features that we don’t have to build: the user management, groups, teams, and all those metagame features that you need in every project.”

“If you want to build social features – or any kind of multiplayer, regardless of whether it’s real-time – you need these components. We were looking for solutions that didn’t involve building everything from nothing and Nakama also has that covered.”

By adding these new social features to 4 Pics 1 Word, Lotum was able to greatly expand what it was able to do with its long-time hit.

"The bottom line is that for 4 Pics 1 Word, Nakama has unlocked a whole set of motivations that have previously been untapped and a whole host of features that we can work on now that we have the technology. It has greatly broadened our horizons." - Schmeller

A Pleasing Solution

Overall, Lotum has found the experience of using Heroic Labs’ tech in its suite of puzzle titles to be a positive one. Some of the key technical features of our tech that the German studio has enjoyed and found useful include:

Multiple languages support

Having a client-side Dart SDK for their Flutter development was crucial, something that most other backend services lacked. Additionally, Nakama’s robust TypeScript support meant most developers could leverage their existing skills and get onboarded quickly.

Managed infrastructure

With Heroic Cloud, Lotum was able to easily deploy and scale their operations without additional overhead. “The inclusion of dashboards was also really nice, you don’t have to build those yourself,” Terwesten explains.

Zero-downtime deployments

The ability to push updates without disrupting active players was a pleasant cherry on top for the team. “The rolling upgrades with zero downtime surprised me. That was something I probably wouldn’t have thought about at the start,” Brito says.

Straightforward integrations

Rather than forcing teams onto a new monitoring platform, Nakama integrated seamlessly with Lotum’s existing infrastructure. “I can extract data from Nakama and integrate it with our already existing monitoring system, which was set up a long time ago,” Brito notes.

Local testing with Docker

Heroic Labs provides a Docker image that lets developers test everything locally with confidence, all part of the bigger goal to reduce developer friction so they can focus on what matters. “Being able to build everything and use the Docker image to test locally was huge for our team,” Brito says.

Conclusion

Thanks to our tech, Lotum is making new types of gameplay – and reaching new audiences – that it was not able to before.

“It’s fun to get things done quickly,” Terwesten says. “That’s always good for morale and to make progress. In those terms, it was a great experience.”

“Before I worked on this kind of synchronous game, I thought that it was going to be very difficult. Having Nakama makes this easy, maybe even easier than asynchronous games, which is very positive.” He concludes:

"When I have to do something in Nakama, I have fun. I look forward to the days I am using it."