League of Shadows was a game for iOS and Android. We started development on it in late 2012 and ultimately shipped it in the second half of 2013.

It was probably one of the more complex pieces of software I've ever worked on, because it combined so many different elements together.

• Rasterized 3D artwork
• Complex character animation
• Asynchronous multiplayer (and thus server infrastructure).
• Detailed particle effects
• The first version of our social network

There were numerous challenges to solve with this game. Firstly, we had to take the huge quantity of character animation files and compress them into a format that allowed us to stay below the 50mb total file size. We ultimately had to build our own file format for this.

Secondly, we had to build out server infrastructure to support the multiplayer gameplay elements. We used a service called Parse to help with this, but we also had services running on Heroku, AWS and so forth. Building out this infrastructure was new to us and we had to learn a lot about how to best go about it. While asynchronous multiplayer was easier to implement than real-time multiplayer, it could still cause multiple fires, when you have 100k concurrent players.

The game was ultimately inspired by a facebook game called "Backyard Monsters", which also inspired "Clash of Clans" by Supercell. They beat us to the market with their game, and we had a hard time competing with them.