Yunguer Dvorak — Devikins

01

// About the project

What was built

Devikins is a mobile collectible JRPG with blockchain and crypto integration, including NFTs, published on the iOS App Store and Google Play. The game has a Story Mode, asynchronous PvP (against teams built by other players and controlled by AI), and real-time synchronous PvP. It was built at MoonLabs Studio with Unity and C#.

I started as a Game Developer and later took over as Tech Lead of the project, with full responsibility for the game: new features, bug fixes, and ongoing publishing and updates on the stores. Among what I built are the complete onboarding, the World Boss system, and visual revamps of screens like the Nursery and Void Adventure.

My focus was the Unity front-end: I integrated per-platform login, In-App purchases, local and remote notifications via Firebase, translation into four languages (Portuguese, English, French and Spanish), and Unity Atoms for atomic variables shared across the project. Game data (game data, images and the like) was downloaded as Addressables from an AWS S3 bucket.

Under the hood, the game had a serverless backend on AWS (Lambda functions) with MongoDB and SignalR for real-time chat and combat, integrated with the Unity client.

02

// Challenges

What made the project difficult

// Leadership

Owning the whole game

As Tech Lead, responsibility ranged from the backend to the stores: prioritizing features, bugs and releases under real deadlines while keeping the live product's quality up.

// Real-time

Live chat and combat

Syncing the Unity client with the SignalR server for chat and synchronous PvP demanded low latency and tolerance for connection failures.

// Content

Addressables via S3

Game data and images were downloaded as Addressables from an S3 bucket. Ensuring that download and client-side content versioning was essential to update the game without republishing.

// Multi-platform

iOS, Android and the stores

Per-platform login, In-App purchases, Firebase notifications and translation into four languages: each layer has its own rules, plugins and publishing processes.

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// Tools

Technical stack

Unity

C#

Addressables

AWS S3

SignalR

Firebase

Unity Atoms

In-App Purchase

04

// Outcome

What I learned

01

Technical leadership: being Tech Lead is as much about prioritizing, unblocking the team and making architecture decisions as it is about writing code.

02

Real-time in practice: syncing live combat and chat taught me a lot about state, latency, and what to do when the connection fails.

03

Content delivery: downloading game data and images as Addressables from an S3 bucket teaches you to separate code from content and update the game without republishing to the stores.

04

Operating a published game: keeping a title alive on the stores involves releases, translation, notifications, purchases and ongoing support, well beyond the code.