PlunderNauts

LightBox Interactive | Lead Game Designer | August 2012 - March 2013

PlunderNauts is a whimsical space-pirate combat game and LightBox Interactive's first foray into the mobile F2P space. Choose your ship, equip your best loot, and warp into real-time tactical battles where positioning and target prioritization are crucial. Move and rotate to keep your target in sight of your guns and blast away! Gather up their materials and loot, craft new weapons and armor, and become the most feared space pirate in the galaxy!

Development

When LightBox Interactive decided to start exploring the mobile F2P space, I became the chief evangelist for adopting Unity as our iOS technology platform of choice, rather than rolling our own engine. While spearheading Unity adoption and training, I also led the effort to transition the team's source control strategy from Perforce to Mercurial. For the game itself, I acted as both designer and gameplay engineer, with my main focus being on the galaxy map and metagame features.

Lessons learned

I learned how to use Mercurial on this project, and that experience was a crucial precursor to my later adoption of and comfort with git, which is now ubiquitous. I also learned a lot about how Unity manages assets, since I had to figure out how to properly configure Mercurial and Unity to play nice together, in a team environment.

This was my first iOS project, which entailed learning how to export iOS builds from Unity, how to use Xcode, and how to deal with provisioning and signing.

From a game design perspective, I did a lot of research on the F2P market to help determine an effective monetization strategy.