Shipped. 2020 to 2025
Republic of Jungle
Unity on the TV, React on every phone, one real-time backend. A party game as a distributed system.
Outcomes
- Roughly 200K unique players across Steam, Epic Games Store, Google Play, and Discord Activities, plus Fire TV and Google TV
- Helped architect the cross-platform play layer connecting the Unity client, React phone controllers, RabbitMQ messaging, and backend services on AWS, and built the Unity client
- Defined the metrics and built the dashboards (MongoDB/Mixpanel analytics) that drove every post-launch update, measuring each change before and after
- Owned release management on six storefronts (submissions, ratings, certification, updates) and PlayStation and Xbox certification work on ports
- Shipped in multiple languages with localization tooling I built and managed
The story
What it is
Republic of Jungle is a social deduction party game for groups in the same room, with a political-satire story told through animal characters. The game runs on a shared screen (such as a TV or a laptop), and everyone plays from their phone through the browser. No app installs, no controllers to pass around.
My role
I co-founded Gerdoo Games in 2020 and ran it through the game’s full life. That meant the design, the pitch, the seed round, the budget, the hiring, and the roadmap, but also a lot of the code. I designed and architected the Unity client, built the animation systems, core mechanics, and UI. I owned the Steam, Epic, Google Play, Fire TV, Google TV, and Discord Activities releases end to end, including store setup, monetization, ratings, and certification, and did the PlayStation and Xbox certification work on the ports.
How we ran it
Every decision after launch ran through data. I defined the team’s metrics and built the dashboards in Mixpanel and MongoDB Charts, then we shipped changes and measured before and after.
I also helped run the community side: a streamer and content creator program, a Discord with its own moderation rules and bots, and a feedback loop from players into the roadmap.
What I learned
A party game lives or dies on the first sixty seconds of a session. Most of our biggest wins were in the join flow, not in new content.
The other thing I learned is who the game is really for. Every group has one champion, the person who buys it, sets up the TV, and talks everyone else into joining. Players come and go, but the champion is the one who brings the game back next weekend. Once we started designing for that person, the host flow, the first-session experience, the reasons to come back, the numbers followed.
