Sine Line is a free casual game developed under our gaming brand Third State Studio for Android and iOS devices.
Sine Line is a 2D mobile game build using Unity 3D game engine. It is loaded with features like multiple game modes, achievements, game stats, leader boards, multiplayer mode using custom C++ multiplayer architecture and AI powered bots to engage real players.
Across 50 countries with 0 marketing spend, due to the game's high virality.
Our users absolutely loved the game for its game play, UI, music and overall experience.
using custom C++ implementation, Sine Line was one of the first few games built on Unity3D with this feature.
Using a Rule Based Expert System developed in-house to give users a high online competitor availability
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.
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.
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.
Making software applications is like making commercial planes, Making games is like making fighter jets. By being a game development company in our early years, what software companies learn in ten years, we learnt in two.
“Anirudh Reddy | Co-Founder, Fruitstone.”