unidice is on a quest to revolutionize gaming with Proxify

About unidice

At the helm of unidice’s team of gaming aficionados is, fittingly, Isabella Helm as a Lead Game Designer. Their gaming console in the shape of a die is a fully interactive experience that comes with its own games or can be applied to classic board games we all know and love.

It can enhance the atmosphere by making sounds on a connected smartphone, through haptics and movements, and can even be applied for many other practical reasons. The company is here to make it the new big thing in gaming.

Isabella and her team are currently focused on the gaming aspect of developing the unidice, while the software development kit they were working on is already functional. Apart from using this innovative die in gaming, it can also be applied in gamification, learning, office applications, and other creative uses of their innovative console.

The challenge

In a world dominated by PCs, Nintendo Switches, and Play Stations, rarely comes a developer that can step up to the task and develop a game for a brand-new SDK. Isabella had a tough time finding really good developers who were willing to work on a special console that was completely new.

“Everyone knows how to develop a game for the PC, but the unidice is something completely different.”, she observes.

They had a problem finding developers for the SDK and the games they were working on, especially with game development studios, because they didn’t have the right profile for working on innovative tools.

“There was also the issue that the SDKs weren’t finished. So we had also to find a developer to finish the SDK and polish it for the game developers, and who is really willing to work together closely with the game devs so that the SDK will be top-notch for everyone.”, she explains.

The solution

As any gamer would know, a hero stumbles to a solution for their problem along their journey where they least expect it. And so it happened for unidice – they stumbled upon Proxify in the vast world of Google. They checked the service out, had a few talks with the Proxify team, and were thrilled to find that “it was just amazing.”

"The fact that Proxify is really testing the programmers before hiring them really stood out to us, in contrast to other platforms."

They hired one developer from Proxify who works on setting up and polishing the SDKs in collaboration with our game developers.

“Our game devs can directly go to our developer here at Proxify and report any bugs that need fixing, polish some things, add new features, and he does it all extremely fast and is just amazing.”

Isabella underlines that their developer is super quick to respond and very easy to talk to, which makes their communication a breeze, despite the physical distance and lack of coworking in a shared physical space.

“He works in a way that it feels like he’s a full-fledged part of unidice itself. He fits in perfectly; he’s there for every meeting, provides feedback regularly, and feels like he’s in the team full-time.”

She adds that since they started working with Proxify, things progressed much smoother and started moving much faster. Having just one more person on the team made a significant difference in her and her coworkers’ workload.

“Since he joined, the SDK gets updated with new features much faster, and it’s amazing to see that our game developers now can just continue programming without much delay.“

The results

Unidice saw that they were saving a significant amount of money since they started working with Proxify since, as Isabella says, in-house game developers they had in their talent pool asked for a “horrendous amount of money.”

“Having him in the team is way more affordable, yet he is a much better developer than most of the candidates in their immediate talent pool.”

Isabella adds that their Proxify developer is not a stranger to suggesting great ideas and offering insightful feedback.

The biggest challenge they faced recently was having a serious bug in their SDK that hindered the whole development of the House of Influence game and threatened their possibility of finishing it up.

“He then worked through the night to get it ready so that everything worked in the morning. He said, ‘Okay, I see the bug. I know how it is. Just gives me a few hours, and it's done’. And really, it was an overnight thing, and it was done. And the code has worked perfectly since then”.

“He makes it easier to deliver a more in-depth, more advanced SDK and focuses on a lot of things that developers need, even in scenarios that aren’t so common. Now we have so many things that the SDK can do that we haven’t thought about before.“

The way forward

The team now has dozens of ideas to apply the unidice in uses they didn’t think of before, such as time tracking by placing the die in meetings. But also where their real passion lies – in developing games.

“My personal passion is gaming, and it would be absolutely amazing to get a few more programmers for the Unity Engine projects from Proxify to really bring my ideas to life.”, she says.

They already have eight or nine games in the backlog that Isabella wants to create for the unidice, starting with hybrid games that combine board and mobile games, ones built specifically for the unidice, and all sorts of other games for their console.

“It would be amazing to collaborate with Proxify to bring them all to life. That would be a blast.”

As for what she suggests for people thinking about testing out Proxify, she simply says:

“Just test it and see for yourself. I think the biggest value of Proxify is that they will find you an extremely good developer extremely quickly. They’re extremely flexible, they have a huge pool of developers, and they’re always checking in if everything’s okay”.