Imagine coming home from work after a busy day and firing up a game designed by thatgamecompany. If you haven’t sampled their work, you’re in for a delectable treat. They're an independent game studio making original games laden with emotion and artistry. What’s most exciting about their games is the approach that supports the creative idea behind every product: when they design a game, they focus on the feelings they wish to invoke in the player and the emotional responses generated by the gameplay. This approach pushes the action into the background, since their goal is to achieve games that exude innovation and creativity.

This unique game dev philosophy has brought them incredible success in the gaming space. Here we could mention two of their best-known and widely-acclaimed products: Flower, released on PlayStation 3 in February 2009, and Journey, released on PlayStation 4 in March 2012.

After these releases, along came Sky: Children of the Light, their first mobile game, released on July 11th, 2019 and available worldwide for iOS devices. Sky kept the concept of social adventure from Journey and took it to another level: you can now fly above seven different realms to uncover a mystery, but the most exciting part is the interaction between players. Since you get the chance to fly with others in order to tackle challenges, you could say that Sky invites you to play this game with your friends.

Sky joined Amber's portfolio when we delivered on the exciting challenge to evaluate and then work on the backend infrastructure. We've qualified this work as a “challenge” because it really was one: we had to assimilate Erlang, an exotic programming language we hadn't used before. Our team of Senior Backend Engineers had to achieve profienciency in record time and then execute complex code operations in this language.

As always, our team proved to be very adaptable, using passion and curiosity to our advantage. Step by step, we pointed out the gaps in the backend architecture of the game, and then proceeded to continuously upgrade the database query and restore the infrastructure as code.

The project was an incredible opportunity to work with one of the most visionary game studios in the world and to also perfect a unique technology.