If you’ve been following Windows Phone for any amount of time, you are likely familiar with the popular game Wordament. This multiplayer, original word puzzle game was initially developed by two Microsoft employees in their free time. Neither were professional game developers, but they had a passion for software that was clearly demonstrated in their output, and the users came. This became clear to Microsoft Game Studios, which quickly talked Jason and John into taking Wordament pro and becoming full time game developers.

But taking a hobby game project and scaling it cross platform to over 1,000,000 players is what one might call non-obvious. In this three part series on MSDN, we’ve delved into the details on how the Wordament guys made this happen, using Azure as a backend, and Xamarin to take their native C# projects to other platforms.

If you’re curious about what it takes to take what started as a nights and weekend hobby game to over a million, check out this series.

Part I. Anywhere, anytime, any device: Wordament’s cloud architecture

Part II. Developing a cross platform app

Part III. Running a business