Evolution Run
Vira Games · Runner · 2024
A growing crowd that moves as one mass, without one agent per unit.
Context
A running shooter where gates along the track add or remove units, or move you along a timeline of eras. Change the year and the whole army changes with it, from stone-age fighters to antiquity to future troopers.
Every era needs its own soldiers — all of them had to fit one animation budget
Content pipeline
Every era needs its own soldiers, and every soldier needs its own shooting animation. Done naively that is an unbounded pile of animation work.
At the start of the project the designer and I split the character animation into an upper and a lower half. A new era then only costs animations for the upper body; the legs are already done.
Beyond that I reused animations between units that moved similarly, adjusting where the weapon sits rather than authoring a new clip.
This game never needed heavy crowd optimisation — around thirty units share the screen at most. The work here was in making content cheap to add, not in holding a frame together.
Worth calling out
I built this one end to end — gameplay, menus, progression, shop, skins, tutorial, ads and store builds. These are the parts worth naming.
- The army
- Group movement for the units and object pooling behind it.
- The era system: gates that change unit counts and swap the whole army for another period.
- The animation budget
- The upper and lower body split agreed with the designer at project start.
- Reuse of similar animations across units, with weapon placement adjusted per unit.
More from the game
Project facts
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Unity Developer
- Team
- Three-person pod — game designer, artist, me
- Scope
- Solo developer, concept to release
- Studio
- Vira Games
- Engine
- Unity, C#
- Platform
- Android · Google Play and Amazon Appstore
- Target device
- Amazon Fire 7 · 1 GB RAM
- Eras
- Ten, each one swapping the whole army
- Crowd
- About thirty units on screen — the cost here was content, not frames
- Formation
- Grid-like spacing with mutual avoidance, and no actual grid underneath
- Where to see it
- Amazon Appstore ↗ · listed as Evolution Run