Albion Publishing :: Raoul Zander

Achievements

As a disclaimer, none of these projects happened in a vacuum. A lot of super talented people from the company and especially the game side of Sandbox Interactive made these successes possible. I'm outlining the parts that I supervised and developed, but will list the measured results that contain the efforts of everyone involved.

Android and iOS Platform Release (Jun 2021)

Together with a team of 3 developers at the time, we

implemented Apple App Store as payment provider
implemented Google Play as payment provider
implemented catalog syncing to both platforms
designed and implemented a pre-registration flow on our website

Result: DAU went from 140,000 to 270,000.

Asia Server Release (March 2023)

I grew the team to 5 developers and together we:

reorganized our infrastructure to split between global processing (purchases, accounts) and datacenter processing (characters, game data)
set up a second infrastructure shard in Singapore (as opposed to our previously existing Washington, DC infrastructure)
designed and implemented a launch page
implemented shop support for new founder packs

Result: DAU went from 150,000 to 300,000. Revenue increased by 90% year over year.

Europe Server Release (April 2024)

Now with my team of 6 developers we:

copied the previous efforts of the Asia Server release
optimized the launch page look & feel
supported cross- and upgrading for Europe founder packs

Result: DAU went from 245,000 to 358,000. Revenue increased by 40% year over year.

Tech Stack clean-up

Apart from the specific launches that brought in thousands of new players and big revenue jumps, my main goal was the future-proofing of the wast infrastructure I inherited. What my team achieved:

Removed languages and frameworks: CoffeeScript, DropWizard
Kept languages and frameworks: Java 8, Spring Boot 2, React
Introduced: GitLab as VCS, RabbitMQ as MessageBroker
Performance optimizations to grow the shop (and underlying infrastructure) from around 80 concurrent requests per second to about 1500 requests per second.

Part of Albion Online 2

Albion Online is a sandbox MMORPG developed by Sandbox Interactive GmbH in Berlin. It's key features are full-loot PvP, a fully player-driven economy and a true cross-plattform experience. Game development started in 2012 and was first released in July 2017. When I joined the studio in March 2019, the 16. update "Percival" was about to be released and the game went free-to-play. Since then the team has grown from 35 to 105 professionals, including 5 juniors and veterans that I hired.

Java 7		85%
xHTML5 6		95%
CSS3 17		90%
JavaScript 5		85%
SQL 2		70%

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