So the big day is finally here! The moment we have been working on since we decided to bring our little Chrome extension / Web game to mobile some 2 years ago.

We have finally made the game globally available on both iOS and Android!

Don't know what I'm talking about? Then check out our trailer:

If you are interested in a little more detail about the history of the game and where that funny name comes from then you can check out another video we put together here.

Since Soft Launch

Over 6 months ago we announced we were entering Soft Launch for mobile. Since then we have been iterating, adding features, tweaking features and fixing bugs. Things have taken a little more time than expected mainly because we decided to focus on our Discord Activities launch which seemed like (and has been) a great opportunity for us.

With that behind us now we are back focused on mobile. The main priority has been performance and stability. One issue with building your mobile game using web technologies is that you unfortunately don't get as much control over resources such as GPU memory as you might do if you were going with a more native approach.

This means we have been at the whim of whatever browser technology is available on the platform. In the case of iOS this means WebKit. It has been known for a while now that WebKit on iOS isn't great, conspiracy theorists would say this is because Apple is intentionally trying to hobble web experiences on mobile in an effort to boost App Store sales. I don't know, all I know is that we have had a bit of a hard time with GPU memory crashes on iOS mobile.

These crashes can happen at just about any point in the game which makes it really tricky to replicate and thus debug the problem. The tooling that Apple provides (only available on Macs of course) isn't great and unfortunately crashes all the time when we try to use it.

We have narrowed down the bulk of the crashing is related to browser layering particularly when combined with CSS animated elements. This seems to force a high GPU memory usage as WebKit attempts to hardware accelerate large layers.

Curiously Chrome (and thus Android) does not have this problem so I, as a Windows user, am not able to debug this problem from my PC.

We don't have a definitive solution for the problem, I suspect the issue is still there but we have tried our best to minimize it by removing most usages of CSS animations (on iOS) and changing the League Page over to a much simpler design as it was the culprit of many crashes.

Apple Feature

A few weeks back we excitedly received an email from Apple informing us that we may be featured on the App Store.

We submitted all the media information required so fingers crossed we do. Apple declined to comment on likelihood or timelines so we will see. If we do get a feature then it should hopefully be a big boost to game traffic. In preparation we have scaled up our servers just in case, I don't want another repeat of the Discord Activities global launch ;)

EDIT: We were indeed featured in the US!

Conclusion

So it's been a long time in the making but we are super excited to have the game finally available to (just about) everyone's mobile device and tablet. I'm looking forward to battling with you guys from around the world soon!