ShadowStrike: Mobile Tactical Shooter
Full-Cycle Mobile Shooter · Unity · iOS & Android
ShadowStrike is a top-down tactical shooter built for mobile, designed from the ground up for touch controls. Nine Pixels handled the full development lifecycle from concept GDD through App Store launch: all engineering, art production, and QA.
The client had a strong GDD and funding but no internal development capability. Core challenge: delivering fluid, responsive shooting mechanics on mobile: a genre notorious for poor touch implementations. Non-negotiable: 60fps on mid-range Android devices up to three years old.
We assembled a 9-person dedicated team and built a custom input abstraction layer decoupling the control scheme from game logic, allowing touch responsiveness to be tuned independently. A predictive aim assist system (subtly correcting touch imprecision without being obvious) solved the mobile shooter feel problem. Performance required GPU instancing, aggressive LOD, a custom occlusion system, and hard per-system performance budgets established before development began.
Nine Pixels cracked the control-feel problem in a prototype within three weeks. Two studios before them spent six months and couldn't do it.