Overview / Usage

Dread Nautical is a tactical turn-based role-playing game with roguelike elements. The player can choose from one of the four possible main characters, each of them having their own unique skills and characteristics. The core gameplay is to explore a mysterious ship from deck to deck, collect resources, recruit allies and fight enemies in a turn-based manner.

There is a huge emphasis on randomization. The ship changes. When returning to the same deck, it’s never exactly the same again, which makes the survivors face different challenges each time.

From a development perspective the key challenge was to create a product working on both desktop platforms and mobile devices, without any major differences in performance or gameplay experience. Thus we had to carefully analyze and handle the performance bottlenecks.

It was also important to consider the specificities of different platforms and change the user interface or the input handling method to adapt to them.

Methodology / Approach

Our team followed the principles of agile software development by using Atlassian JIRA® to organize and manage the ongoing tasks and bugs related to the product. This helped us to bring together the different components of game development, such as product management, gameplay and sound design, art, code and QA.

The main framework we used for development is Unity. This powerful game engine was easy for all participants to work with.

It was crucial to define the responsibilities appropriately and make the code base flexible enough to be capable of being highly configurable, in order to avoid the development flow becoming too coder-heavy. Thus the randomization, game balance and generally the game assets are designed to be driven by configuration files.

For optimization, we used Unity’s profiler tools to find performance bottlenecks. To eliminate excessive memory allocation we applied Unity’s new Addressable Asset System for dynamic asset loading.

Technologies Used

● Game Engine: Unity

● Input handling: Rewired plugin for Unity

● Coding: Visual Studio 2015

● 2D Art: Photoshop

● 3D Art: 3ds Max

● OpenOffice