Sine Line: A Fast-Paced and Fun Casual Game

The story of Sine Line

This was our second game which was first published in late 2016 while we (the co-founders) were still in third year of under-grad. We had spent just 3 weeks into the development of the first version of Sine Line before publishing it on to the App stores. The immediate response was extremely positive and we knew we were on to something with a great potential.

We spent the next 2 years working on improving the user LTV by adding more features, multiple game modes, unlock-ables, leader boards, etc. Finally moving on to adding a multiplayer mode which we though would improve virality and play time. This was quite a challenge as there was no out of the box solution/service that was useful to us given our metrics at that time and we had to build one our selves. After we had launched the multiplayer mode, we realised that unless there are a certain number of players online at any given time, the multiplayer mode would'nt take off. Which then lead us to adding bots to the game which behave just like other human players. Our users loved this feature a lot And the average session times more than tripled.

More about our custom multiplayer solution

In our attempts to improve user LTV we have to come up with innovative ideas to drive up engagement. Multiplayer mode in our game was an obvious thing to do. The multiplayer service offered by Unity3D was extremely expensive for casual mobile games with low LTV. So we built our own multiplayer solution using C++ and a solid design and architecture that could do 100K Requests per second with latency less than 1ms all will a server costing less than $20 a month.

More about the AI bots

We could have built an AI using neural networks that would have been the best at beating everyone at the game. But obviously it wouldn't be a fun opponent to play against. So we opted to build a Rule Based Expert System which acts exactly like real human. This implementation also game us control over how strong we wanted the AI to be. This means we could spawn stronger bots to play against stronger players and vice versa.