Proxipolus

1 year ago

Proxipolus was Proximus's big Monopoly-style activation game. Players move around a 3D city board, reconnect connector tiles, play mini-games, spin for prizes and redeem their tickets for real rewards and vouchers. My role on the project was the backend.

The most challenging part was actually the communication. A whole team of new Unity developers had been contracted while I was away travelling in Thailand, so once I was back I had to get everyone on the same page about how the game and the backend should talk to each other. This is where I feel I really shined. The collaboration went really well, and the flowcharts I made to map everything out were genuinely appreciated by the team.

It stuck with me. Ever since this project I make flowcharts and ERDs at the start of every new project, because they turned out to be such a nice add-on when you are working together with other teammates.

On the backend itself, the hardest part was the logic around tags, attributes and Airship push notifications. It had to support a lot of users in a very short period, so I really had to think about a solution that could handle that load. I ended up with multiple cron jobs combined with a Google Cloud Tasks queue to push all the API requests through quickly, and I made sure there was proper retry logic for any calls to the Airship API that failed.