Original Games

Original Games may be a relatively new studio, but their founding team and developers are industry veterans and bring a wealth of experience to their new venture. They are focusing their combined experience and expertise on creating a new generation of casual mobile games, with a focus on social features and live operations.

Their largest title to date, Merge Inn, is a casual merge game where players solve puzzles to cook orders for the inn’s customers. With a rich in-game economy and social features enabling players to join and play in clubs, chat together and gift the various energies and rewards available, Merge Inn provides an engaging experience to keep players coming back and progressing.

The game is an early success, with millions of downloads across the app stores and an actively engaged community. We sat down with the team behind Merge Inn to discuss the game’s success and how Original Games is utilizing Nakama and Heroic Cloud to build a great player experience.

The Challenge

Original Games was founded to build “the most relaxing and rewarding casual mobile games, with universal appeal and deep player engagement.” To achieve this, they needed to focus on creating amazing content and a great player experience, not on building and maintaining a backend.

The experienced team behind Original Games knew that building and maintaining a backend is a huge undertaking, and that it would take time away from their core focus. They also knew that they would need a backend that could scale to support millions of players, and to do so they would need to hire a team of engineers to maintain it. As a new studio, they didn’t have the time or resources to devote to such a large undertaking.

They were also aware of the limitations presented by existing solutions in the market, such as needing to patch together multiple services to get the functionality they needed, the lack of flexibility and control, and prohibitive pricing structures.

“We looked at many options in the market, and Heroic was the best choice for us and the flexibility and feature set we needed for our games.” - Arseny Lebedev, Co-founder and CEO

Heroic Cloud and Nakama, the Perfect Fit

When the team compared Nakama to their other options, the choice was clear. Nakama’s flexibility and control, combined with Heroic Cloud’s ease of use and pricing structure, made it the perfect fit for Original Games.

All the features the team needed right away - authentication, groups, storage, and chat - were available out of the box, as well as the features they would need in the future, such as leaderboards and tournaments, wallet and in-app purchase validation.

And if they needed to add any custom functionality, they could do so easily with Nakama’s server runtime features and support for TypeScript, which the team found to be a huge benefit and “easier than writing cloud code in Firebase.”

Looking Ahead

In addition to adding more of Nakama’s social and competitive features to Merge Inn, Original Games is actively migrating their latest game, Mergedom: Home Design, acquired February 2023 in a deal with Bigger Games, from PlayFab to Nakama.

“[By migrating to Heroic Cloud] We'll be able to reduce costs, save time on support, and share code between projects, improving our development cycle.” - Arseny Lebedev, Co-founder and CEO

About Original Games

Original Games was founded in 2019 by Alexander Krylov, Arseny Lebedev and Ville Heijari. They headquartered in Singapore, with a development studio in Lisbon, Portugal.

Build It Yourself

Are you interested in building a game like Merge Inn? Do you want to quickly add social, economic, and LiveOps features to your game? Check out Hiro, our Unity specific dev toolkit to quickly and easily add many composable gameplay systems, such as Rewards, Virtual Wallet, Store Bundles, Live Events, Personalization, Leaderboards, Guilds and more.

Defining a three-tiered energy system like Merge Inn - with energy, coins, and gems - is as simple as:

{
  "energies": {
    "energy": {
      "start_count": 100,
      "max_count": 9999,
      "refill_count": 1,
      "refill_time_sec": 90,
      "implicit": true,
    },
    "coins": {
      "start_count": 100,
      "max_count": 999999,
      "implicit": true,
      "reward": {
        "guaranteed": {
          "energies": {
            "energy": {
              "min": 10
            },
          "items": {
            ...
            }
    },
    "gems": {
      "start_count": 100,
      "max_count": 999999,
      "implicit": false,
      "reward": {
        "guaranteed": {
          "energies": {
            "energy": {
              "min": 10
            },
          "items": {
            ...
            }

Contact us to learn more about how the Heroic Game Stack can help you build and launch your next game.