We had received a spec from the publisher, along with some feature protype projects, which gave the basis for this game. It was intended to be played on mobile VR, and we were to use head motion to control the movement of the shark.

One of the major tasks I undertook on this project was to develop the AI for all the other fish and sea creatures. Given the relatively fast paced nature of the game, it was acceptable for them to be somewhat simplistic, but they had to be seen to flock, or hunt, or run away. A major limitation of this was that the level was pretty open, so to have it feel interesting, we ended up having several thousane AI entities. For this reason, I designed the system in order to be able to balance the work done, so we could get reliable updating, but did not overpower the device.

Related to the performance, it was difficult to establish what was causing us problems a lot of the time, so I wrote a debug profiling system, which would track the performance and write it to a file, along with information such as the current facing direction, and camera field of view. With this information, I could then use it offline to generate a 3D heatmap of frame time, allowing us to identify problem areas and address them individually.