What we set out to prove
A commute-length twin-stick shooter - sessions built to start and finish inside a fifteen-minute train ride, without feeling truncated.
What made it hard
Bullet-hell games live and die on screen readability, and mobile screens are small, held at arm's length, with a player's own thumbs covering part of the action. A pattern that reads perfectly on a monitor can become an unfair, unreadable mess on a 6-inch display.
How we solved it
We rebuilt our bullet-pattern system around a "readability budget" - a hard cap on simultaneous on-screen projectiles that scales with screen size, tested against real devices rather than a simulator. Enemy telegraphs got exaggerated well past what would look tasteful on PC, because half a second of warning on a monitor is barely perceptible at arm's length on a phone. We also restructured runs into procedurally-stitched two-to-four-minute segments, so a fifteen-minute session always ends on a clean stopping point instead of mid-boss.
What shipped
Static Pulse hit its target - median session length landed right in the fifteen-minute window we designed for, and it became a reference build internally for "how loud can this game be while a player can still see what's happening."
UnityC#2D ToolkitCustom particle/pattern budget system
Open lobby
Got a game that needs this kind of attention?
Pitch the problem - we'll tell you which engine, and how we'd prove the fun first.