Galacide

Partner studio: Puny Human

Concept

A shoot-'em-up and match-puzzle hybrid in which players blast through destructible bit-sequence walls while a pursuing “Bitwall” closes from behind, supporting up to four-player local co-operative play.

Requirement

The studio needed to prove Unreal Engine 4 capability end to end, at a point when UE4 was new enough that experienced teams were genuinely scarce. That meant taking an original design from concept to a multi-platform commercial release on a compressed schedule, including console certification, with no external client absorbing the risk.

Approach

An eighteen-person team designed and built the title in Unreal Engine 4 over a nine-month cycle, with an in-house build pipeline, website and release infrastructure built alongside it.

Puzzle layouts were authored through a data-driven, spreadsheet-based system rather than in-editor volumes — an early expression of the data-driven approach the studio later applied to optimization on client work.

Console and Linux ports were developed in-house, giving the team first-hand platform certification experience it went on to sell.

Delivery scope

• Game design
• Gameplay and systems programming
• 3D modeling, animation and level design
• Performance optimization
• Hardware porting (PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Linux)
• Build pipeline engineering
• DevOps and cloud engineering
• Publishing, storefront and web

Results

• Steam Early Access March 2015; full PC, SteamOS and Linux release 28 July 2015; PlayStation 4 23 October 2015; Nintendo Switch subsequently
• Nine-month delivery with an 18-person team
• 60–90 person-months delivered
• 82% positive on Steam
• Established the Unreal Engine 4 credential that opened the studio's entire co-development business the following year

Engine: Unreal Engine 4.