Summary
A survival game in three connected phases: a real-time raid where you directly control one character, a management layer aboard a ship between raids, and sea travel where narrative events decide what you arrive with. Flat-screen PC, built solo in Unity 6.
The vertical slice is code-complete. What remains is art, scene dressing and a balance pass.
The problem
Three phases means three different sets of controls, camera rules, UI grammar and pacing, and the usual result is a game that feels like three prototypes sharing a launcher. The design problem is continuity: a decision made in the management layer has to be legible as a consequence during the raid, or the phases are just adjacent rather than connected.
What I built
All of it. The raid’s character control, navigation and encounter logic; the ship management layer; the sea travel event system; the data pipeline that defines survivors, items and campaign map state; the save architecture; and the development tooling used to build and verify it.
The architecture is strict about one thing in particular: runtime state lives in plain C# objects owned by managers, and scene objects are views over that state rather than owners of it. That is what makes three phases share one game rather than three. It also means the game’s state can be saved, inspected and tested without a scene loaded at all.
Technical detail
Unity 6 on URP, targeting Windows. Scenes are the source of truth and are hand-authored rather than generated, with editor tooling restricted to authoring data, prefabs and addressable wiring so that a menu click can never erase a dressed scene or its navigation bake.
The build was driven through a documented session plan with a verification gate at the end of each: a batch-mode compile check, a self-test harness, and a written record of what was checked and what was not. Thirty-three sessions ran that way. The interesting part is not the volume, it is that the architecture had to be specified precisely enough – invariants, ownership rules, assembly boundaries – that work could proceed against it without re-litigating the design every time.