Esports & Education · Esports Education
Squid Academy LMS
An esports academy’s learning platform: Riot Games data, single sign-on, a mobile app on one codebase, and an AI-generated front end taken to production against the existing backend. Ongoing since 2025.
- Focus
- SAAS, CUSTOM-WEB-APP
- Delivered
- 10 Mar 2026
- Location
- London, United Kingdom
Outcome
3.5K students stayed online while a Lovable-built front end was mapped onto the live LMS.
What Squid Academy is
Squid Academy teaches competitive gaming to students and reports progress back to parents. That makes it an integration problem rather than a content site: player statistics pulled from the Riot Games API for Valorant, single sign-on so students arrive with the account they already play on, and a learning platform underneath holding courses and progress.
The same engagement covers the tournament platform, published separately, and the mobile app that took the academy onto Android and iOS from one codebase.
The work
Riot Games exposes a lot through their API, including tournament structures, and the useful engineering is deciding which of it a parent should actually see in a progress report. Single sign-on removes the account-creation step that loses students before the first lesson.
The learning platform holds the courses and the progress data, and stayed live for its 3.5K students throughout the front-end transition.
The mobile app
Students and parents wanted the academy on their phones, and the academy did not want two apps to maintain. The mobile app was built once and shipped twice: Android first, published to Google Play in early 2026, with the iOS build produced from the same codebase.
It logs in with the accounts students already hold, Google or Apple, so the account-creation step that loses students before their first lesson is gone on mobile as well as on the web. Course content, progress and the tournament platform all read from the same LMS backend the web front end uses, so nothing is entered twice.
Roles, partners and pricing
The academy sells through partners as well as directly, so the platform carries a reseller role nested under partners, with the data flow and interface adjusted so a partner sees only its own schools. Partners can carry their own branding inside the LMS for the products they resell.
Pricing is subscription based, with tiers for gaming centres, schools and organisations, and course modules sold on top as one-off purchases. Class size limits are enforced per tier, so a promotional hundred-student classroom and a standard fifty-student one run on the same code.
Where it is now
The engagement has run continuously since April 2025. Work in hand at the time of writing separates the tournament platform from the LMS so it can carry its own pricing, and takes the new front end through the mobile app so both surfaces stay on the same release.
Technologies
What we built it with
- Integrations
- Riot Games API
How we built it
Mapped a Lovable-generated front end onto the existing LMS, with the platform live throughout. The new front end had been produced in Lovable and was worth keeping, but it arrived with its own data model that the existing LMS did not match. Rather than rebuild a working system to satisfy generated code, we mapped Lovable's model onto the current LMS API, hid the parts of the interface that assumed data the backend did not hold yet, and moved the rest across in stages. The platform stayed up for every student on it.
In the client's words
“We turned up with a Lovable front end and 3,500 students on the old one. They mapped it onto what we had instead of rebuilding, and nobody lost access.”
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