Stumble Upon Rumble

A little about the project

Stumble upon Rumble, a nostalgic, retro world focused on real skill & fair competition. Fed up with how Pay-to-Win- and/or RnG- based games are these days, we wanted to create something that really gives you this good old feeling of winning back. Fights which you can only win if you are the better player.

And of course, everything is more fun with other people! In this spirit, we have designed Stumble upon Rumble to be as social as possible. Gameplay takes place in servers of (currently) up to 30 players, where each of you is moving and interacting in real time. Watch the others fight, chat with the others and play mini-games.

The game is currently in closed beta phase, while we iron out the last important updates to gameplay features before release. It will be released on PC first, but is planned to have mobile port later on.

View on Epic Games Store

Tech talk

While this project may appear simple at first glance, there is actually quite a bit going on behind the scenes. The technical elements involved range from the game client, to dedicated servers, databases and APIs.
To not accidentally break things on the live environment (even though the project is not fully released), we've set up a 1:1 duplicate of the live environment for development purposes. This means that we can go crazy with testing, tinkering and upgrading without running the risk of impacting the thoroughly tested and configured services linked to the production version of the game.

My Role

In March of 2020, I was approached by David who was looking for a developer to bring this idea that he had to life. At that time I just finished college where I had studied game development for 4 years (of which one year was internship), and was working for Sparkling Society. I was up for the challenge though! So I started hammering away at the initial game design that David had worked on.
For a while I was the only person involved on the technical side. This means that I was taking care of game development, web/api development, server infrastructure management and of course programming all the things that were running on said servers. In the present, we work with other tech professionals which requires good strategy and coordination. Though many of the technical tasks that I summed up earlier are still part of my work.

Until mid-2023, I worked on this project part time (because I had my full time job at Sparkling Society). After setting up my company, Senhorst Digital SRL, I got to work on it fulltime.

So tl;dr; I coordinate with other technical people involved with the project, aid in the planning and estimation of features and am the overall person responsible for all development/infrastructure and tech related things within the project. To the public we usually define my role here as the CTO and Lead Developer of the project.