- Role
- Co-Founder / Developer
- Studio
- Xenium Games
- Year
- 2014 — 2020
- Engine
- Unity
- Platform
- Mobile
A neon arcade shooter out of Xenium Games — the studio he co-founded and ran alongside the day job for six years, shipping casual mobile titles with nobody else to hand the hard parts to.
The brief
Running your own studio means you are also the analytics team, the monetisation team and the plugin author. Xenium shipped self-published casual games on mobile, which meant every decision — what to build next, whether a mechanic stayed — had to be answered from the game's own numbers rather than a publisher's brief.
The build
3 notes from inside the codebase
- 01
Letting the data pick the features
Firebase analytics was wired in to oversee how the games were actually played, and feature decisions were made by running A/B tests rather than arguing about them. New mechanics were engineered against real user feedback, aimed at engagement and retention across several releases.
- 02
Native plugins where the engine ran out
Unity covers most of a casual mobile game and then stops. The rest — the platform-specific pieces the games needed — was written as native plugins for Unity.
- 03
Monetisation as part of the build
The games were monetised through the AdMob network, which on a self-published title is not an afterthought bolted on at the end but a constraint on pacing, session length and where a break in play can reasonably go.
Key facts
- Co-founded
- Studio
- Firebase + A/B
- Analytics
- AdMob
- Monetisation
- 6 years
- Ran for
Stack
- Unity
- C#
- Firebase
- AdMob
- Native plugins