Nova Blast - Mobile Game Modernisation & Android Port

Nova Blast is Foil Hat Games' block-blasting puzzle game, in which players aim an alien's blaster at a grid of coloured blocks and chain power-ups to clear each level within a limited number of moves. In 2020 the game was live on the App Store, and Foil Hat Games brought us in for three months to update it with new content and prepare it for Android. We moved the project from Unity 2018 to Unity 2019 Long Term Support (LTS), updated its packages and fixed obsolete and deprecated code along the way. Foil Hat Games supplied the new gameplay fully designed and ready for implementation. We added new tiles and power-ups, reworked the level select and gave the game a general polish pass. We also extended the level editor with support for the new tiles, usability improvements and validation against invalid levels, which matters in a game with 250 levels. For Android, we adapted the game for display cutouts and the wide range of devices it had to support. Foil Hat Games were extremely happy with the results, giving us a 5 star review and a hope to collaborate on more projects in the future. The modernisation and Android port case study covers that work in detail. That collaboration continued when Foil Hat Games returned to keep Nova Blast on the stores. In a week, we upgraded the game from Unity 2019 to Unity 6 to meet current Google Play and App Store requirements, migrated its Unity Ads and Unity In-App Purchasing (IAP) integrations to the current packages and added haptic feedback and tablet support. We also cut the download by around 50MB, largely by taking the level map scene from 218MB to 6.8MB, and introduced an adaptive frame rate to extend battery life. The Unity 6 upgrade case study covers that work in detail. Nova Blast is a representative example of the porting and software development kit (SDK) modernisation work covered by our mobile game development service.