Using LiveOps to supercharge in-game events for Power Rangers Mighty Force
Learn how the team behind Power Rangers Mighty Force uses Unity’s LiveOps solutions to deliver engaging events and become more responsive to player feedback.
How do you power up the idle game genre for Power Rangers fans? Mighty Kingdom, an Australia-based development team that creates fun-filled mobile games based on beloved cultural IPs, used Unity’s LiveOps solutions to deliver a consistent cadence of action-packed events.
Power Rangers Mighty Force invites fans of the series to bring together heroes from across the Morphin’ Grid to defeat Rita Repulsa and her monstrous minions. Through episodic events and timeline-hopping story adventures, players can progressively power up their team while collecting their favorite Rangers, Zords, and weapons.
Delivering a dynamic live game experience requires a robust, tightly integrated tech stack. Read on to see how Unity helps the Mighty Kingdom team continuously deliver exciting game events and fine-tune player progression with each new update.
The results
• Successfully delivered three live events weekly
• Created competitive PvP leaderboards that refresh daily, with over 30,000 players at launch and 9,000+ DAU
• Decoupled features from updates to develop more efficiently
Choosing a single solution over custom tooling
The Mighty Kingdom team develops in Unity – but for Power Rangers Mighty Force, they rely on more of Unity’s in-Engine tech stack and multiplayer ecosystem than ever before.
Previously, Mighty Kingdom leveraged a bespoke internal backend system, MKNet, but maintaining it meant they would have less time to spend building and running Power Rangers Mighty Force. After evaluating several options, they chose Unity's LiveOps solutions. "The main reason for this decision was our team's expertise in the Unity ecosystem meant for an easier learning curve to implement the features we needed," says engineering director Ben Calder.
“With this game, we’ve tried to use as much of the Unity Engine as we can,” adds Scott Cabot, principal engineer. “We wanted to get the most value without having to write too much bespoke tooling.”
They started by implementing a robust backend through Unity’s Cloud Dashboard. The intuitive graphical interface has simplified the process of setting up different environments for development, staging, and production. “Setting the environments up, setting the build system up, CI/CD, all of that to handle content delivery – that side of it was really seamless,” says Calder.
This straightforward pre-launch setup allowed the team to quickly determine the best QA workflows and build integrations for custom 2D authoring tools from their publishing partners at East Side Games.
Building events with meaningful rewards
With a universe of Power Rangers, monsters, and Megazords at their disposal, Mighty Kingdom knew early on that episodic adventures would form the heart of their idle game. Fans of the series appreciate both smaller, self-contained narratives and larger story events featuring cross-universe team-ups, so the team linked the two together with a compelling rewards system.
“I think of the idle genre like a garden,” explains Daniel Keogh, Mighty Kingdom’s product manager. “It doesn’t demand constant attention, but with smaller investments, it produces satisfying rewards.”
To engage players, the team designs live events that award in-game currencies, milestone rewards, and a major completion bonus for those who successfully defeat Rita’s minions. Each week, players can tackle up to three events to gather Morph-X energy, unlock new world areas, and earn collectibles.
“Between weapons, Rangers, and vehicles, there’s an enormous amount of things to collect,” says Keogh. “Growing and strengthening your collection becomes quite rewarding.”
Upping the ante with Leaderboards
Mighty Kingdom uses Unity’s Leaderboards to add a competitive aspect to Power Rangers Mighty Force. During limited-time events, leaderboards award additional bonuses for top performers, and players can unlock power-ups for a PvP mode that pits their mighty morphers against others in asynchronous combat.
“We needed to deliver that feature relatively quickly,” explains Cabot. “Leaderboards provided a pragmatic solution for delivering that to our players.”
Any Ranger team that enters an in-game event is automatically queued into a daily PvP leaderboard with its own unique perks. This creates a rewarding game loop for the most dedicated players to vie for rare loot.
“Each day, there is a new leaderboard to see who has the strongest team of Power Rangers,” says Keogh. “This lets players flex their collections, but also adds tactical elements around which Rangers you pick, where you place them, and what their unique abilities do.”
Making matchmaking mighty
Apart from helping players show off their in-game achievements, Leaderboards also unlock creative workarounds to bootstrap Mighty Kingdom’s matchmaking algorithms early in development. By saving info about the teams who queue together as event metadata, the team circumvents the need to implement a persistent data store. Instead, they can determine the range of matchmaking opponents using ephemeral entry data from PvP queues. The higher you rank, the tougher the competition.
“We found that to be a very low-fi but quite robust solution that just worked for us,” says Cabot. “It also allows us to do other things, like using Cloud Code scripts to fill the leaderboard with fake teams to test things during QA.”
Cloud Code proved useful beyond QA by also helping to ensure a seamless player experience. For edge cases where there are too few equally skilled opponents available at a given time, players can compete against clearly identified bots queued up by the game’s backend leaderboard services.
“We use our leaderboards almost like a live service,” says Calder. “Players really want to know their position, particularly towards the end of an event, so we’re almost constantly polling the leaderboard from the client.”
Opening up testing workflows to free engineers
Since launch, Unity’s LiveOps solutions have been the backbone of ongoing content development. Game Overrides allow the QA team to target specific device IDs in order to test events locally or in development builds, while tools like Addressables and Remote Config enable Mighty Kingdom to deliver incremental updates.
“When we use overrides targeted to user ID, many different people can be testing different events and different configurations of the game in the same testing environment,” explains technical designer Geoffrey Burman.
To encourage non-technical team members to conduct testing directly, Mighty Kingdom uses Game Overrides to feature-flag new features and disable them by default. By teaching teammates to toggle individual features in the development environment using Game Overrides, they have expanded testing access and freed up valuable engineering bandwidth.
“Historically, we’ve had issues where too many things became engineering tasks by default,” says Burman. “We’re trying to use these tools to democratize the process. Once everyone got over the fear of changing configurations, it’s been very successful internally.”
Keogh agrees. “As someone from the non-technical side of things, I found it very empowering. It gives me the confidence to jump in, set overrides, and get to testing something immediately.”
Managing live environments through Remote Config
This testing paradigm has also influenced development workflows. New features are now toggled off by default, and the true game state exists in activated Game Overrides managed in the production environment through Remote Config.
“With everything off by default, we have the same workflow for actually releasing features,” says Cabot. “I just create the override in production and slowly up the percentage of users that we roll out to.”
This approach allows developers to trivially add feature flags in future updates, streamline development by decoupling features from content releases, and create a kill switch if problems arise during rollout. QA teams can deploy events to a specific group of player IDs for comparative testing or even run live events on devices within the production environment for final review before widely releasing a public build.
“We’ve standardized the procedure for doing things across development and production,” says Cabot. “Anyone on the team that’s worked with Remote Config just knows how it works everywhere.”
Feature flags have proven invaluable for tweaking game balance. Since adopting this policy, the team has been able to modify event-specific game features and rewards to create “rerun” episodes where players can revisit their favorite story moments, earn different rewards, or catch up on episodes they may have missed.
Understanding player behavior
“One of the biggest draws of the game is the constant flow of new Power Rangers,” says Burman. “We don’t want that to be too restrictive; we want people to be able to get those characters as they come in.”
To ensure that progress feels both forthcoming and rewarding, Mighty Kingdom continuously monitors gameplay balance and makes small adjustments – no easy feat for a game that transpires in calendar time.
“It’s difficult to accurately test the player experience for an idle game in a quick way,” says Burman. “You can use debugging tools and so on to skip through, but it’s not exactly the same. That’s why we regularly monitor backend analytics data and player sentiment across socials to identify progression blockers.
To help the team identify how players were engaging with Power Rangers Mighty Force and flag areas where they felt stuck, Burman built visual dashboards using data from Unity Analytics. Detailed visualizations made it easy to share stats on global win rates and reward distribution, and they intuitively revealed less obvious insights, like pain points with a particular boss battle.
“Analytics have helped drive our decision making,” says Keogh. “Those detailed custom dashboards give us awesome insights into vital play patterns.” By continuously reassessing game balance through player feedback and analytics data captured in Unity, the team can identify outliers and tweak game difficulty to help players overcome perceived obstacles.
Another key component to preserving game balance is rapidly responding to issues as they occur. If players catch and report balance issues early enough in a live event, Mighty Kingdom can use Remote Config to address them without incurring downtime.
Promoting a positive ecosystem
Power Rangers Mighty Force players have always been an essential part of the game’s development. To thank those whose input has been especially valuable, the Mighty Kingdom team built a light web-client wrapper for Unity Admin APIs to distribute rewards to these community heroes.
This tool helps Mighty Kingdom’s support teams grant unique rewards to players participating in important milestones such as the game’s worldwide launch and provides an incentive for honest players to report suspected cheaters.
“In any live game with leaderboards and competition, you’re bound to encounter some number of cheaters,” says Burman. “We’ve seen success by allowing players to report players to customer service in return for rewards.”
When players report cheaters, Mighty Kingdom’s customer support team can run Cloud Code scripts to analyze privately scoped Cloud Save data and review Leaderboards metadata for indicators of exploitative play. Once a determination has been made, the support team can use Game Overrides to flag cheaters and restrict their ability to match with other players.
Powering player engagement
A tightly coordinated LiveOps setup enables the Mighty Kingdom team to keep their idle game exciting for players by continuously delivering fresh content while reducing the need to integrate and maintain bespoke tooling.
“Unity’s LiveOps solutions allowed our engineers to embrace the systems and upskill quite quickly in an environment that was familiar. Gone are the days of having siloed information – instead we have paved the way for future games at Mighty Kingdom to use a common approach to the backend,” says Cabot.
“They're also user-friendly enough that others don’t feel too intimidated setting up simple Game Overrides or making adjustments to Remote Config,” adds Keogh. “It’s really helped to empower more members of the team to be able to execute these kinds of tasks. This increases our productivity enormously when we have confidence that most members of the team can urgently send out player compensation or a global message to all players.”
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