InnoGames GmbH is a German video game developer based in Hamburg. Founded in 2007, it focuses on the development of browser and mobile games. The company now has millions of registered players and revenues that reached €190 million in 2019.

The client was using Zend Framework 1 as the core framework for the backend, slowing down the development cycles, the onboarding of new team members, and compromising the security and the future of the project. Besides this core problem, the client prepared various of its ad campaigns that needed to reach the players in-game through multiple spreadsheets and assets placed in the file system, consuming hours of multiple professionals to reach the final state that normally passed through reviews and needed adjustment.

The first project lasted around six months and involved the entire engineering team effort, slowly deprecating and rewriting pieces of modules to adapt to PSR-7, assessing performance impacts with Tideways until ready for the complete migration to Zend Framework 2. The second project was building a section inside the existing administration tool, written in AngularJS, which posed a challenge to deliver a UX that is up to today's standards. But with around six months of development, we finished a release process that reduced the involvement of professionals from all departments, enabling campaigns to be configured and tested by non-technical professionals.

The results were a more efficient engineering team that can now rely on more up-to-date documentation and community support and a more manageable path when hiring resources or onboarding resources to the team. The performance was increased, and a lot of code was replaced without compromising the game's functionalities.