Uptown Bingo

Uptown Bingo is a game I worked on during my time as a game developer at GamePoint. A mobile bingo game with the goal of collecting furniture to decorate your clubhouse.

Uptown Bingo started as a bingo game combined with Gardenscapes. The idea was that you play bingo games and by winning you'd get awesome furniture that you could use to decorate your clubhouse. Leveling up would unlock new areas in the game that you would also be able to decorate. The bingo game itself was a mostly social game where you would play against other players in the hope to be the first to claim bingo.

After being part of the team behind Uptown Bingo for over a year it was decided that we needed to pivot and change course. Players were completing the game to quickly and the game wasn't enough of a succes to be sustainable. So as a team we came up with a new plan. It would be a complete makeover. The multiplayer bingo game had to go and would make way for a single player version. This allowed us to have more control of the game and the outcome and thus slowdown progression in places where players were progressing too fast. Another change is the way items for the clubhouse were earned. These no longer came from winning the bingo game. Instead by playing bingo you would get a lootbox that would be upgraded by getting more bingos. From this lootbox you would get collectible cards and by completing a set you would finally get the item. Placing items would also be changed. Instead of earning items all randomly you would now have to unlock the item spots progressivly one by one by purchasing the item spot with coins also earned from the bingo game. Once you have unlocked an items spot you would get a default item for that spot to fill it up. And by collecting the collectible cards and completing sets you would get variations for those items. This way you would have a more linear progression and are we able to tell a story through the progression in the game. Oliva would gradually fix up the broken clubhouse and become the hottest bingo spot in town. This new version would finally be called Uptown Bingo: Citylife.

After having worked as a web developer for a couple of years I saw a vacancy posted one day for a job as game developer. This was at my old internship GamePoint. This was of course a great oppurtunity for me because I studied to become a game developer and this was my change to finally start my career as one. GamePoint of course was already familiar with me and my work and I was lucky enough to get the job.

As a game programmer on this project I worked on a variety of things. A big part of my job included fixing bugs and implementing new features. One of the bigger things I worked on was helping implementing the new item catalog. And later on during the rebuild I was a big part of building prototypes and implementing the lootbox system and a system to exchange duplicate collectible cards for in game currencies. I started of as a junior programmer and so I still had to learn a lot. We had a very experienced lead developer on our team who I learned a lot from. During my time at GamePoint I also used to take up some smaller dev ops related tasks like for example being responsible for creating builds through our CI/CD pipeline.

From working on this project I learned a lot about how to build a better architecture for games and how to deliver a reliable product. I learned to analize and optimize the project for mobile platforms and debug in difficult environments. My time at GamePoint has definitly influenced me as a programmer and helped me grow in my career.