Fleet Commander: Pacific
Took over a naval strategy game after the previous developer left mid-project. Untangled an undocumented codebase, then built multiplayer, AI and designer tools on top of it.
Situation
Fleet Commander: Pacific is a digital board game of WWII naval combat designed by Philippe Thibaut, the designer behind Europa Universalis. Turn-based, with real-time resolution of each turn.
The previous developer had left mid-project. What remained was a codebase with no documentation, broken references between systems, UI and data, and a .gitignore that had silently dropped Unity .meta files. Nothing new could be built until that was sorted out.
What I did
Untangle before building. I restored the project to a state where it opened cleanly, references resolved and the build was reproducible. Some of the existing design decisions could not be undone, so a lot of the job was choosing what to fix, what to work around and what to ship as-is.
Then build, as essentially the sole programmer. New mechanics and systems. Designer tools so Philippe could adjust ships, stats and scenarios without waiting on me. AI opponents that command whole fleets. Sound and particles. Continuous bug fixing.
Multiplayer with Mirror. Turn-based synchronisation with a client replication model, Steam integration for file transfer, and a set of serialization problems that broke save and load across the network until they were solved.
Result
- The game launched on Steam with 40+ ships in play, working multiplayer and AI.
- Designer tools that kept the designer productive without programmer support.
- A codebase the next person could open and understand.
Stack
Unity, C#, Mirror, Steamworks.