Evaluation

High level of what was achieved during the graduation project

Achieved:

Blue Giraffe and I find that my graduation assignment in Blue Giraffe was successfully carried on. With the features I have developed and implemented in Text Express, I have enabled the game to grow in a social aspect and integrated prerequisites for a community to be formed around the game, all with the view to increase the organic growth of the game and reduce the money spent on User Acquisition.

Easy and fast testing to see what your players like to see in the shop:

By implementing the new design and flow for maintaining the In-game shop, I have made it way easier for the designer of the game to create, modify and customize store offers, all of that dynamically, without having to update the game for the players. Having this ability to constantly tweak and improve the in-game offers, will lead to easier testing on what people like seeing in the shop, and therefore more purchases being made and more satisfied players. To read more about the evaluation of the dynamic shop deals and what more could be done to improve this feature, please go here.

The prerequisite to building a social community around the game:

As the developers of Text Express plan to maintain the game in the long term they want to build a big player community around it. The first step into doing that is allowing some kind of social interaction between the players. As this is not possible without a social login system, I have implemented Facebook and Google's login system. This was a feature, which leads to safeguarding the profiles of the players and is believed to increase the longevity of the players in-game. To read more about the evaluation of the social authentication system I have developed and how it can be improved, please go here.

Feature, which allows players to invite more players into the game:

By implementing OneLink- a deep link service, in Text Express, I have managed to create a feature, which gives the opportunity to the Text Express' players to invite their friends. Such functionality leads to the players doing "word-of-mouth" advertising, which will exponentially increase the organic growth of the game and eventually save up money for User Acquisition. If you want to read more about the evaluation of deeplinks, what else it was achieved with them and what could they be used for in the future, please read that here.

Easy way to communicate with your players, when they are out of the game:

By implementing OneSignal- Push Notifications service, I allowed a very easy way for the developers of Text Express to target their player base even when they are out of the game. Such access to your game's community may be used for returning churned players, promoting various in-game features, or for interesting marketing campaigns. For a better evaluation of the push notification system I have integrated into Text Express and how it can be upgraded, read it here.

Overall

Although, most of the features I have implemented will not directly influence the organic growth and show better metric results, I believe and know that the fruits of their implementation will come in the long-term when the game has more finished look and more features are built around the functionalities I have developed.

Feedback to the company

Overall, I have been very satisfied with the flat structure, the technical and design documentation, the organization and the agile way of work in Blue Giraffe. However, there are little technical aspects, which I believe would make Blue Giraffe reach the next level:

Pull requests

As I have never worked with pull requests, I can only imagine why they are good. However, I think that if we had reviewed one another's code, every time we make a commit, we would have achieved the following:

1. We would have been more familiar with what the other person is working, therefore be more aware of where the project is and where it is going.

2. We would know how the other features in the game are technically operating, therefore saving time to figure that out on your own.

3. We would improve one another, by constantly giving each other feedback on our technical implementations, therefore growing as professionals.

Unit tests

Again, I have never had the chance to work with unit tests in a big Unity project, but I believe that if the project was built around such, the development would have been going way faster. Text Express is already quite a big project and implementing unit tests would take a lot of time and would need a lot of refactoring, however, I believe that it will bring a lot of benefits as well, such as faster feature deliveries, fewer errors in your code and better code architecture.