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War of Nova

Project Image Project Image

War of Nova is a 4x game played across multiple seasons. Each season, players will find themselves on a new map with 2000 other players, split up into 8 sci-fi/fantasy factions. Over the next 4-8 weeks, they will wage war with each other on a massive hex map in realtime.

On top of being a crazy technical challenge for a mobile game, it also features tons of progression systems, and complex social features like alliances and in-game chat

I am the Lead Frontend Engineer on this project. This game was built 100% remotely, with team members spread out in the US, Canada, and Pakistan

It's hard to appreciate how much work and love actually goes in to a project like this unless you've lived it. Please enjoy these videos of the various gameplay systems, and feel free to check it out on the app store

i didn't record the following video, but i love the enthusiasm. It's a pretty fun game when you're rolling over the enemy with 50+ guild members.

General gameplay sped up. OK in this video i'm mostly just screwing around on the dev server, there isn't a ton going on, but you can still get a feel for map & ui navigation here

Timelapse of a contested area

Faction Select. Playing videos in unity is a pain, but the results are nice. This screen also renders the faction's starter ship to a texture in the UI :)

Tutorial System. We developed perhaps the most robust tutorial system I've ever seen. It could also serve up different content based on the faction you chose

Player Base. Every faction has custom art here, and the system supports upgraded skins based on progression. Animations would just trigger based on whether the player base was upgrading or not, and there is a remarkably robust ambient system for background ships whizzing by.

Reinforcements screen. Here you can load your motherships up with smaller fighter pilots in a pleasing 3-D scene. We managed to add some depth of field blur here on mobile without breaking our framerate (somehow!!)

Ship management. Ships have multiple progression tracks, they can be equipped with officers, and they have a tech tree on top of it all

Player Tech Tree. The player can also customize a tech tree for themselves as they leveled up

Single player challenges. We cooked up a more cinematic mode for these challenges to resemble what you might see in your favorite space opera. We already had amazing combat visuals, which was a great start...to that, we layered in cinemachine, lots of camera dolly, and slow mo. It's very cool, this was a group effort and the results are mesmerizing to me.

Combat Logs. it's hard to tell unless you dig, but the game has a pretty insanely deep ability system that results in very very granular combat reports. Have a look. We also developed debug tools for designers to simulate and aggregate 1000s of logs in minutes, for balancing purposes.

Gacha chests. I hate this stuff in games if i'm being honest, but I can still brag about the work that goes into it. For this we leveraged unity's Timeline feature to sync up audio and visuals. I created a very layered audio composition here to sync up to the visuals as well, which was a first for me.