Bleeding Edge

The official site for Ninja Theory's new IP launched live on stage at E3.

Project Overview

Cambridge based games studio, Ninja Theory were in need of performant, multilingual, dynamic and exciting website to be the online home and central hub of their brand new IP, Bleeding Edge.

The challenges

  • Game announce and site launch had a hard deadline of June 9th 2019 during the Xbox keynote presentation at E3
  • Huge amount of publicity meaning hundreds of thousands of people would potentially visit the website as soon as the url is revealed live on stage
  • Site localisation in 20 languages
  • Requirement for a fully featured, integrated forum
  • Allow users to login with their Xbox/MS Live account
  • Seamless registration to the game alpha by syncing data collection to be synced with back office software and processes
  • Must be fully content managed including custom redemption code creation in the backend
  • Must meet Microsoft accessibility and compliance requirements

The solution

We meticulously integrated various platforms and technologies, NodeBB, Power BI, Wordpress, and Xbox Live enabling fans to effortlessly register via their Xbox Live accounts and access a plethora of perks across the site.

This resulted in a robust solution, facilitating alpha sign-ups for fans and empowering Ninja Theory to nurture their expanding community through the site, forum, and backend reporting systems.

As the site braced for potentially thousands of users seeking content and technical alpha access, optimizing performance took precedence.

Powered by Wordpress and featuring a NodeBB forum, our challenge lay in managing two systems built on distinct languages. Choosing a 'headless' approach, we utilised Wordpress for data via its APIs, decoupling our frontend architecture from a Wordpress theme for heightened control and security.

The frontend app, employing Single Page Application architecture, seamlessly fetched data directly from Wordpress. This was complemented by the Vue.js framework for rapid speed advantages, coupled with a custom Node API.

Further enhancements were made to how we cached MySQL query results using a custom Redis integration, resulting in substantial load reductions on our frontend servers.

The entire ecosystem found its home on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform allowing on scaling to meet the demands of the initial launch, with continuous integration and deployment orchestrated through Bitbucket and Azure Dev Ops.

Tech stack

  • Azure
  • Azure Dev Ops
  • Azure Web Apps
  • MailChimp
  • MS Login
  • MySQL
  • NodeBB
  • nodeJS
  • PassportJS
  • PostgreSQL
  • PowerBI
  • Redis Cache
  • SCSS
  • Vue.js
  • Wordpress