CGN4 - Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 4 - Cross-platform social Sudoku with Azure PlayFab
Cloud Gaming Notes Episode 4 features Dominic, a Senior PM Manager at Microsoft, who built Sudoku Social — a cross-platform competitive Sudoku game for iOS and Android — entirely as a passion project outside his day job.
The problem Dominic solved: Most Sudoku apps were platform-locked. Players on iOS couldn’t compete against players on Android. Sudoku Social bridges that gap, enabling cross-platform leaderboards and social play. The driving question: who is the fastest Sudoku player?
Technology choices:
- Unity — chosen for its build-once, deploy-to-many model (iOS, Android, and future platforms from a single codebase)
- Azure PlayFab — game backend-as-a-service handling player accounts, leaderboards, friend systems, matchmaking, and statistics. PlayFab’s APIs significantly reduced the backend development effort compared to building those services from scratch
- Azure DevOps — CI/CD pipeline for the game build and release process
The learning journey is a recurring theme: Dominic had no prior Unity, iOS, or Android experience when he started. The episode explores how iterative improvement — revisiting and refactoring both art and code as skills grew — mirrors the developer diary model seen in indie games like Stardew Valley.
The episode is a strong case study for using managed cloud gaming services to accelerate solo or small-team game development, and for how passion projects can serve as genuine career-expanding learning experiences.
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