The Outfit7 Tech Blog

Hello, world! That line’s been printed to console by every programmer at least once in their lifetime. And it’s also an appropriate way to welcome you all to the Outfit7 Tech Blog.

Outfit7? We’re the people behind Talking Tom & Friends (which you’ve probably heard of). The brand was launched in 2010 and currently has a portfolio of 20+ games (My Talking Angela 2, My Talking Tom Friends, My Talking Tom, Talking Tom Gold Run, etc.) that have been downloaded more than 19 billion times! In fact, Talking Tom & Friends has been the most downloaded mobile game franchise worldwide for 10 years now (2013–2022).

But we all know that humongous download numbers are only one part of the story. Having the tech to handle 500 million monthly users, 5TB of data per day, and thousands of multiplayer users across the globe simultaneously is not a walk in the park. Unless, of course, you take that walk with a hundred brilliant tech experts (and you still walk for a while). And that’s what we did (metaphor aside).

Over the past 10 years, a lot has changed. We no longer fit on one floor of our office building (actually we no longer fit on eight floors). Our tech department went from four people to over 120. Our one wannabe analytics employee became a department of over 10 professionals. And we’ve now automated more tasks and written more unit, integration, and e2e tests than there are monkey NFTs. And, you know, we released a couple of games, each with billions of downloads.

But some stuff has (amazingly) not changed.

We’re gamers and we love technology in all shapes and sizes. We’ve always strived to use all the latest technologies that the mighty tech world has to offer, even though that meant rewriting/refactoring/restructuring our code again and again. We switched our game engine a couple of times and even wrote our own game engine (that was a tough one). We went from old Java’s JSP dashboards to AngularJS, and from there to Angular and now to Vue.js. And we’ve tried all the different game architectures — lately the ECS.

A simplified view of how we connect different parts of our games, from Game to Native and Backend. Every part is developed by one or multiple teams — connecting all these teams and departments is a technical challenge of its own.

Technology is at our core here at Outfit7. We try everything that we think might be either beneficial or even just interesting to do. Some stuff fails miserably, but some results are just amazing. And we’d like to share what we’ve learned with you. It’ll give you some insights into how we do stuff. And maybe it’ll spare you a couple of months of investigation or give you some ideas of what else you could try optimizing, refactoring, automating or taking to the next level.

Our Outfit7 experts — people of over 25 nationalities from all of our technology departments (Game, Android, iOS, Backend, DevOps, Web, and QA) — are really looking forward to sharing their stories, experiences, and expertise on the Outfit7 Tech Blog, both for the mentioned and not-yet-mentioned topics. This blog is our chance to engage with the tech world and provide you with quality and original content. We hope you find it interesting and useful.