- Role
- Senior Game Developer, then Release Manager & Team Lead
- Studio
- Azerion
- Year
- 2019 — 2023
- Engine
- Unity
- Platform
- Web · Mobile
One of the longest-running virtual worlds on the internet, ported off Flash and rebuilt in Unity — every feature written again from scratch, while the game stayed open.
The brief
Flash died on a published schedule, and Habbo had a two-decade-old codebase and a community that would notice any difference. There was no porting tool for this: the game had to be rebuilt feature by feature in Unity, matching behaviour a player base knows by heart, and shipped continuously rather than in one big-bang cutover.
The build
4 notes from inside the codebase
- 01
Rebuilding a twenty-year-old game from scratch
The port was not a translation — the core features were developed again in Unity, using StrangeIoC and a strict MVC approach so the new client had a structure the old one never had. That architecture is what made it possible to rebuild feature after feature without the codebase collapsing under its own history.
- 02
New features against a live backend
Feature work ran in cooperation with the backend developers, structuring and optimising the data each new feature needed on the server side rather than bending the client around whatever the API already returned.
- 03
Running the release train
As Release Manager: 5+ major platform deployments a month, orchestrated through Jenkins across many build and test iterations per release, with automated CI/CD pipelines carrying QA regression. Release scope was agreed with product and design, mapped onto the yearly roadmap, then deployed to live servers on the day.
- 04
Leading the team that built it
As Development Team Lead: distributing work by complexity to the person who could do it well, feeding workload reality back to the product team during sprints, and building processes that gave the team room to develop themselves — alongside mentoring the mid and junior developers day to day.
Key facts
- Flash
- Ported from
- StrangeIoC MVC
- Architecture
- 5+ / month
- Releases
- 3.5 years
- On it for
Stack
- Unity
- C#
- StrangeIoC
- MVC
- Jenkins
- Git