Game Development and Live Game Systems

Both, though the systems are where most of our work sits. Full-cycle development in Unity and Unreal, and separately the backend that games depend on — multiplayer servers, economies, matchmaking, live operations, wallets and analytics. Many studios have strong game teams and no backend capacity, and that is the most common engagement.

Considerably more than the game. Player accounts with KYC, a wallet with deposits and withdrawals, contest and prize engines, live data feeds for scoring, responsible gaming limits, and jurisdictional rules that vary by state or country. The collusion and multi-accounting controls are not optional either — where money is at stake, people will try, and detecting it after payout is too late.

With an authoritative server and client prediction. The server decides what actually happened, the client predicts locally so the game feels responsive, and the two reconcile when they disagree. Lag compensation makes hit registration fair across different latencies. Trusting the client is what makes a game cheatable, and it is close to impossible to retrofit once the architecture assumes it.

Yes, with constraints. The useful pattern is a model grounded in the character's knowledge, personality and the current game state, with hard limits on what it can say and a fallback to written dialogue when it goes out of scope. Unconstrained models break the fiction, leak information the player should not have, and occasionally say things you cannot ship. Latency and per-session cost also matter more here than in most applications.

By designing sinks before sources. Most token economies fail because rewards enter faster than they leave, value inflates away and early players exit with it. That means modelling the economy under adversarial behaviour before launch, building real currency sinks into the loop, and being willing to tell you when the economics do not work regardless of how good the game is.

Longer than most software of similar scope, and it depends on what you are building. A casual title with a defined loop can reach a playable build in weeks. Multiplayer, economies and platform certification extend it considerably, and console certification runs on the platform holder's schedule. We scope against a defined vertical slice rather than a feature list.