The iSport Fantasy project shows what enthusiasm and close cooperation between development, product and editorial teams can achieve. The team had to push hard to make the start of the football season, so the first working version was built in just three months. iSport Fantasy now has 26,000 players and we have big plans for its further development.
Initial development sprint
Two back-end developers from the in-house team, a collaborating front-end developer and a graphic designer were tasked with building a working fantasy league in just three months. The deadline for launching a working product was 17 June, for the first round of the Chance Liga.
The first step was integrating data from the Opta platform, which provides detailed statistics from sporting matches. As this is a completely new data source, the back-end team had to ensure the import and management of the data to guarantee accuracy and timeliness for all users. The most technically demanding part was setting up the calculation of points for players. Each player has their own unique line-up, which the system must match against updated real-world data.
The back-end logic of the game was partly inspired by an older version of a fantasy league that once ran at CNC, but the brief was to create a system that would let us run fantasy leagues for other sports as well. Not only for football, and for sports fairly similar to it like hockey, but also for sports with entirely different logic, such as Formula 1.
Development used standard tools. iSport Fantasy runs on CNC infrastructure, the back end is written in PHP with the Symfony framework, and the front end is mostly plain HTML. Most players of iSport Fantasy play on mobile devices, so we put great emphasis on usability there. Given the time constraints, development focused on delivering a 100% functional product that was, in terms of features, very stripped down. Thanks to the huge commitment of everyone involved, we managed to launch it on time.
Launching is not the end, it is the beginning
Thanks to great cooperation and promotion from iSport personalities such as Bárt Černík, Michal Kvasnica and Adam Nenadál, more than 10 thousand users registered before the launch, which exceeded even our optimistic estimates.
The first rounds of the competition revealed that calculating results took too long, up to 2.5 hours, partly because of the number of users. So, in addition to fixing bugs, the team focused above all on optimising database queries and parallelising calculations, which dramatically cut processing time to today’s 20 minutes.
At the same time we focused on communicating with players, explaining the rules of the game, and making clear that the product is at an early stage, that any errors will be fixed quickly and that players can look forward to new features.
An important internal innovation for keeping these promises was creating our own pre-production environment. This sandbox is a copy of the live system and lets us simulate game scenarios and test new features without touching production and without the risks that come with it. A key part of this system is a custom “time machine” function, which makes it possible to simulate different moments in time. The sandbox significantly simplified testing and sped up the deployment of new features.
Once the product was stabilised after several game rounds, the team could turn to its development and add new features such as jokers, leaderboards and detailed player statistics, which make the game more and more attractive to users. Further updates are planned, for example following other users and automatic substitution of players.Pulling together pays off for everyone
The success of iSport Fantasy mainly shows the importance of cooperation. The development team was in contact with the iSport editorial team throughout all phases of the project, and we should highlight the support of Tomáš Kropáček. The editorial team also gave the project a lot of space in its content and ensured promotion, which, together with that, brought record user numbers.
Milan Frýbert, product owner of the project, comments: “The success of the fantasy league is definitely not my merit, but that of Tomáš Knejpa and the guys who took it on. This project beautifully shows that when we work on projects as a team, development, product and editorial, and people are enthusiastic about it, we can deliver extremely interesting things extremely quickly, which also bring us new users.”
iSport Fantasy currently has 26 thousand users, 18 thousand of whom are active players.
Comments