Case studies / StepPals
A TectSoft case study · Live-app rebuildStepPals turns a daily step goal into caring for a virtual pet. Players raise it, build a history and collect the pets they have nurtured.
Ben wanted the game to do more, including a pet on the home screen and an Apple Watch experience. We took over the existing Unity app and rebuilt it in a new technology.
The players had already started their game. We had to let them continue it.
StepPals · App Store screens
Imagine opening an update and finding an empty account where your pet and progress used to be. The work you put in yesterday appears to have vanished.
The old and new technologies recognised players differently. A rebuilt app could mistake an existing player for someone who had never played.
The new app had to recognise a life already being lived inside the old one.
Changing the foundation meant keeping accounts, saves, subscriptions and the game’s rules connected. A different way of counting missed days could change what happened to a pet.
Ben’s next version needed to make room for new ideas while respecting the people who had made the existing game part of their day.
Continuity was a product requirement.
We reproduced the old player identifiers, kept the save format and ported the game rules. The store identity and signing setup let the new build arrive as an ordinary update.
A real Android upgrade test carried the account, pet and progress across. Subscription restoration gave the new app a way to recognise existing purchases.
The rebuild connected old players to the new experience.
The transition exposed a save problem: a device could write empty state over an existing save. For a player, the result was the same pain the migration was meant to prevent.
We traced the failures and changed the save flow. The app had to load the existing data before writing, and writes were processed in order. Support tools also gave the team a way to inspect and repair saves.
The handover was not finished at release. We followed what players experienced.
The rebuilt StepPals became the live app. Our work added phone widgets, a Watch app, subscription restoration, a lifetime plan and tools for support.
Ben had a team carrying the existing game forward while developing what it could become.
A live-app rebuild is also a commitment to the people already using it.
You don’t have to choose.
We rebuild underneath live apps and carry the people already using them across. Tell us what yours has to keep.
For developers: Unity to React Native port shipped as an in-place store update, legacy player identifiers reproduced, PlayFab save format preserved, Android releases signed with the original production key, HealthKit and Health Connect step input, a hydrate gate and serialised writes to stop empty state overwriting saves. One recorded upgrade test is not a promise that no player ever had a problem; we followed up on the ones who did.
