Dumb Ways to Survive

Collect, harvest and hunt your way through the wilderness as a bumbling bean trying to stay alive.

  • The game was built on a custom ECS implementation. Working on this project I honed my understanding of ECS architecture, an d quickly became comfortable authoring my own systems and components for new features.

  • I implemented a system for designers to bind custom logic to gamepad navigation of the game’s UI document without code.

    I implemented functionality for screens designed by our UI team for new features.

  • The first major content update I worked on for this title. This included adding a new biome on top of the existing four, new items, new status effects, new create types and new objectives to the endgame.

    This also involved fixing bugs that remained in the game since launch.

  • I worked on an unreleased major update which involved porting the previously mobile-only title to Netflix’s Cloud Gaming platform.

    I drastically reduced the VRAM usage by optimising the post-processing effects and implementing a custom texture atlas generation tool.

    I added gamepad support and added tools to allow the designers to adjust the player experience to account for latency.

    As the Cloud Gaming platform was being simultaneously developed, I had to respond to SDK and development environment changes regularly, as well as provide feedback and request features to best expedite development.

  • The final major update I worked on focused on reworking the game’s progression system.

    I provided time and resource estimates for several large features for a team of 3 engineers.

    I implemented recurring daily goals as well as relevant push notifications to reduce player churn.

Dumb Ways to Survive

PlaySide Studios / Netflix
Winner for Excellence in Emerging Games at the Australian Game Developer Awards 2024

Collect, harvest and hunt your way through the wilderness as a bumbling bean trying to stay alive. Will you die a dummy or use your smarts to survive?

I contributed to three major content updates for this game. The first was an expansion which introduced a new island to the endgame. This included new objectives, items, mechanics and internal design tools. The second involved porting the game from Mobile to Netflix’s Cloud Gaming service, which involved massive UI updates, as well as gamepad support and graphical optimisations. The third focused on user engagement, revamping the endgame loop and introducing daily objectives and push notifications.

Dumb Ways to Survive was built for iOS, Android and Linux using Unity/C# on a custom ECS implementation. I used the Netflix Mobile SDK for cloud storage and account switching. The UI was built with UI Toolkit.

This was my first time using ECS, and Unity’s UI Toolkit. I had a one-week handover period when I started this project before I was either working with a small team, or solo. This entailed the steepest learning curve in my professional career, but I’m very happy with what I was able to accomplish despite that.

App Store / Google Play

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