Empowering QA and Support: Mighty Kingdom’s Backend Team
Invisible to the player is a department that holds Mighty Kingdom together: our Backend. Though not always apparent, the work of the Backend team is incredibly vital to our players and game devs alike!
Depending on a project’s needs, the Backend provides us with a range of integrations for our games, as well as internal tools such as inventories for our testing products. A lot of their integrations are perfect for our Quality Assurance (QA) and Support teams. The champions of quality throughout our entire development process, QA and Support aim to make sure our players have the best game experience possible.
One day in QA is different to the next; they work across projects in varying stages of development, and with disciplines across the entire studio, all with the goal to help everyone produce their strongest work. As Lucie Migné, QA Analyst, says, “...every bug that we discover and bring to the team’s attention is an opportunity for learning and improvement, rather than an issue to be fixed!”
While QA is fairly internally-focused, Support interacts directly with our players. Josh Goodwin, Player Support, spends the day communicating with players across our various platforms. He gathers feedback to compile reports for the team to review and assess and has been developing our Customer Service documentation to help streamline the issue resolving process. “Our goal is to create a better game experience for players,” he says. “Oftentimes, player issues require a bit of creative problem-solving programmer help - and Backend wizardry!”
Peter Rabbit Run! leaderboard
Supporting the QA and Support Teams
The Backend integrations into Mighty Kingdom’s games help us gather important analytics data, which is then presented in simple dashboards for product teams to interpret. This data helps us make informed decisions about the games – for instance, a product manager could ask how many players played the Halloween event in a certain year. Using the Backend, we can quickly pull the data to see how many players engaged with the event, how long for – even how much they enjoyed it.
Backend also provides the systems for players to contact Mighty Kingdom’s support teams directly in-game. The data gathered allows Support to monitor the number of support tickets received, their tone and contents. If there’s a trend of players reporting an unsatisfying experience in a game, this can let the development team know that there might be an unknown issue in need of further investigation – so time to jump on it!
Bug reports can be generated and sent directly to the Support team for logging; the team can then analyse reports and player feedback and share this with development teams, so that we can continuously improve. Making this process easy and efficient means that every team can focus on what they do best.
The Backend can also be seamlessly integrated into third-party customer service tools – for instance, our Support team uses Zendesk. This will eventually become Mighty Kingdom’s central touchpoint for all communications with players, with the ability to combine all reviews and player messages into a concise and easy-to-understand interface.
We also have an in-depth product inventory tracking system at Mighty Kingdom. So that as many players can enjoy our games as possible, we test our games on a variety of products – from older mobile phones to various control pads, we try to cover a wide range of products. This means there’s greater accessibility for everyone.
Screenshot from Wild Life, a Mighty Kingdom mobile game
Empowering Our Players (Anonymously)
“Make a purchase in one of our games? Want to transfer game progress to another device? You can be sure that the Backend systems makes sure players receive the right rewards and can transfer data with ease,” says Lucie. Since the Backend tools allow us to easily track game accounts and purchases – anonymously, of course – we have built-in features which make it simple for players to transfer their games across devices, without losing their progress or purchases. Incredibly useful when players are upgrading phones, or want to switch to playing on a tablet!
“Being able to track these details offers us an opportunity to grow deeper relationships with our players so we can create the best player experience possible,” Josh explains. The tools assist us in resolving player issues for those who have met bugs and other bumps in the road of the live game environment.
And one of the biggest benefits of our Backend tech? Since it’s all in-house, we can make sure the data is kept safe and anonymous – without having to worry about issues from third-party platforms.
Data privacy is essential when working on games that are specifically for kids, as set out in guidelines such as GDPR and COPPAS. We work hard to ensure that all data collected is anonymised and secure so that we’re not only complying with guidelines; we’re also making sure our players can trust that we’re keeping them safe.
From tracking bugs to building reports on how players use and experience our games, the Backend team and QA team work together to help the development teams make informed decisions based on real player activity. Whether it’s working out if a game’s difficulty needs to be tweaked, or checking the best options to help a customer having issues with a game – data-driven QA, supported by our Backend tech, is an essential aspect to Mighty Kingdom’s success.