Publidash: a project which drove Voodoo’s success
With more than 5 billion downloads worldwide, Voodoo is a leader in the hyper-casual mobile gaming market. Our reputation is built on our expertise in publishing hit games, we help thousands of studios around the world transform their ideas and prototypes into hit games played by millions of people worldwide. Three years ago, two full-stack colleagues created Publidash, a tool that allows studios to submit their games easily. The tool also facilitates communication between the studios and our publishing managers to make sure the process runs as smoothly as possible.
Publidash is one of Voodoo’s oldest projects, and it has largely contributed to the company’s success. To take it a step further, we then transformed Publidash into a full Publishing Platform — allowing anyone in the world to submit their game and test it on the platform, with an increased visibility on games already tested to boost inspiration and discussions within the community. For every game submitted, we track relevant KPIs to test whether or not the game has the potential to be a future hit.
Putting the user first
When I joined the project, Publidash was over two years old. It was nonetheless still in a POC (proof of concept) state and needed improvements in several different areas: technical, UI/UX, and marketing. At the time, the interface for both studios and publishing managers was the same, and the platform would encounter occasional bugs. The full-stack engineers were focused on maintaining the platform rather than making it evolve, but there were several new features that we wanted to add, such as the distinction between different iterations, KPIs, and adding a video display time.
So, my mission when I joined the project was to continue innovating on the platform by making it more intuitive and reactive. As Voodoo was constantly growing, we wanted it to be capable of managing a much higher volume of studios simultaneously. We also wanted to split it between studios and publishing managers, as the two have different expectations and needs within the platform.
After dividing the two types of users, two directions quickly emerged for the project. For publishing managers, we created a simplified page that allowed them to view all the prototypes they received and were currently working on quickly and easily. For studios, we created a more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface and provided more visibility and details on the different steps of our collaboration.
Project evolutions
The optimisation project originally started with myself and Bruno Rodrigues work, a fellow back-end engineer. We started the project with the new page for studios which gathered all the KPIs received from Facebook and GameAnalytics, a data analysis tool for mobile games. We then took these KPIs and displayed them on the new page using accessible and appealing graphs. We took two to three months to do this, and once delivered, our publishing managers were super positive about what we’d done, and wanted the same thing for themselves! This is how the project transformed organically from one page to a total redesign of Publidash.
Today, as soon as a studio submits a game, the platform automatically creates a campaign on a preferred ad-network list, which pulls relevant data such as a game’s CPI of a certain period of time. This data, transparent for both studios and publishing managers on the platform, allows us to determine the potential of a game. Tracking the data carefully, our publishing managers will detect games with strong statistics and get in touch with the studio that created it. Through close collaboration and coaching, drawing from our years of experience and our knowledge of current trends, the publishing team helps the studio improve the game and increase the KPIs to the maximum. Once the relevant KPIs have been reached, we then offer the studio a contract to turn it into a hit that will be played by millions of users around the world.
The choice of technologies and time management
Finding the right tech
In terms of technology, we started from scratch on the front-end, and for the back-end, we reused a stack that Bruno and I had used on our first project together to pull all KPIs from Facebook and GameAnalytics.
The purpose of the front-end was to create a dialogue between the two main APIs:
The back-end API to retrieve stats
The previous API which was used to push games and videos on Facebook, creating campaigns automatically.
In terms of project organisation, the tasks were divided into two pairs when we joined the initial team. The original pair continued tool maintenance. One full-stack engineer took on more of a DevOps role, in charge of automatics deployment and CircleCI, whilst the other took on the role of maintaining the back-end stack and harmonising it with the new one. The newest pair, myself and Bruno, focused on creating and pairing the new features.
We were using Vue.JS for the project, which worked very well. We did have to put a new front-end architecture in place to ensure that the dialogue and reconciliation of data between the various services was done correctly.
On the back-end side of things, Bruno was able to pitch in and give us his opinion on the stacks we were using. We switched from Python to Node.JS, which was more commonly used at Voodoo and therefore easier to maintain in the future.
Overcoming challenges
The biggest challenge for the back-end was re-using the services that were already in place, linking the two, and managing the two cases. I had to call a service and send the data to the new one. The idea was to create code-independent services, each one with its own responsibilities. At one point, it became more complex, as the data that we need to retrieve and then aggregate between the two services was needed not only by the studios but also by the publishing managers.
We were lucky to be working with the Product Owner, Loic Moisan, who had a strong vision of the platform as he was already working with it. We then collaborated with a designer to review the Moc on the new platform. We worked in an agile, scrum environment with two week sprints, including grooming meetings, breaking down the needs of the publishing managers into tech features, and a sprint planning to sort out different tasks. We also had recurring deliveries to work on at the same time.
Delivering a scalable and solid project
In the final stages of the project, delivery was probably one of the most challenging moments. The day we put the platform into production, we had to make it work, make it scalable, and make it solid, all without being able to test it beforehand with so many users! On the business side, the plan is to always be one step ahead of the competition, especially in terms of creating new features adapted to the needs of our partner studios.
Since then, we’ve been working hand-in-hand with the new teams to keep continuously improving the services on the platform, such as the engineering solution in the Publishing teams. Given our continuous growth, these teams are also currently recruiting!
The Voodoo Growth & Engineering team
This has been by far my favourite project since joining Voodoo, especially as it’s really at the core of the business! This is the platform that allows us to help studios create future hits, so it drives our success.
I also really liked the fact that we needed to be one step ahead of the competition; it’s a challenge that drives and motivates us every day. It’s a really collaborative atmosphere too, any member of the team can submit ideas on how to improve the platform. The knowledge sharing aspect, which allows studios to learn from each other and past prototypes, was actually one of our ideas. It’s always rewarding to know that as well as taking ownership of the project, we also have the opportunity to pitch in with ideas on how to help the platform evolve.
Joining the Growth & Engineering team means working closely with the business and participating in strategic projects with high added value for the whole company, as well as our role as leaders in the market. As per Voodoo’s values, we’re given full ownership of our ideas, the choice of technologies, deadlines, teams, and the distribution of tasks.
As we constantly have more and more features to implement, we’re looking for both back-end and front-end engineers to join the team. We’re looking for talented people who love video games to join us and get a foot in the door of the gaming industry. For more information on available positions, feel free to contact me or apply directly via our website: https://www.voodoo.io/careers.
