AquaNox: Deep Descent

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

An underwater vehicular combat game set in a flooded far-future Earth, reviving a cult PC series. Players pilot armed submersibles through a campaign and skirmish modes, with ship customization and upgrade systems layered over six-degree-of-freedom combat.

Requirement

The project had been in development for roughly five years following a 2015 crowdfunding campaign and needed outside capacity to close out. The specific asks were user interface and systems programming — customization, upgrade and campaign flows carrying a great deal of state — and game and render performance optimization across PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, where fully volumetric underwater environments are expensive to render.

Approach

Engineers were added to the UI and systems workstreams, implementing and hardening interface and gameplay systems against a codebase that had accumulated years of iteration and multiple direction changes.

A parallel optimization pass targeted both game and render performance across the three shipping platforms, ahead of a simultaneous release.

Delivery scope

• User interface programming
• Systems programming
• Game performance optimization
• Render performance optimization
• Multi-platform validation

Results

• Released 16 October 2020 on Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
• OpenCritic 67 across 26 critics; underwater combat and environment visuals consistently identified as the title's strengths
• Long-running crowdfunded production brought to a simultaneous three-platform release
• 15–30 person-months delivered, across 2–4 engineers

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.