Build in Public — Devlog #01. I'm building my first game ever for Shipaton 2026. I asked the internet what I was getting wrong before I wrote a line of code, and the answers changed the plan on day one.
I have never opened a game engine
That's the honest starting line. I'm an Flutter developer. I know Backend/ bit of Kotlin, I know Gradle, I know the shape of a mobile app. Last week I knew exactly zero about colliders, raycasts, physics steps, or why everyone on the internet argues about Update() vs FixedUpdate().
Then RevenueCat's Shipaton rolled around, and I decided the sensible thing to do was enter it with a game. Two categories: Build in Public and the Game Award. So here's the public part — including the part where five strangers told me my plan was too big.
The idea: One Bullet Arena
Up to six players. Each one gets one bullet. That's it — one.
Miss your shot, and the bullet doesn't disappear. It hits the wall and sticks there. Now it's a pickup. You have to physically walk over and retrieve it, in the open, before you can fire again.
Every shot is a resource decision, and every miss puts you in the most exposed position on the map. Cheap to build, easy to explain in one sentence, and the tension comes from the rule rather than from the graphics — which matters a lot when the person making the graphics is me.
Why Unity 6 + 2D URP
I want to be straight about this: I did not pick Unity because I know Unity.
I picked it because Unity is the only engine with an official RevenueCat SDK, and this is a RevenueCat hackathon. The monetisation layer has to work. I'd rather learn an engine than fight an unsupported payments integration at 2am the night before submission.
2D URP because I'm shipping to Android, I want lighting to be cheap on a mid-range device, and 2D keeps the art scope inside what I can actually produce.
So I asked before I built
Day 1 goal was small: get a player moving, and get a bullet that sticks to a wall.
But first I did something I don't do enough — I asked. I posted on X:
https://x.com/0xKarthick/status/2089250305359946129
And I posted the same question to r/Unity2D.
What I actually concluded
My original mental image was six players in an arena, online, shooting at each other. That's the finished game. It is not the first game.
Here's where I landed:
| Phase | Scope | Why now |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2D level-based single player. One bullet, ricochets, bots, hand-designed rooms. | Ships. Proves the mechanic. Teaches me Unity. |
| 2 | Local same-WiFi multiplayer. | Real opponents, no hosting model, no NAT traversal. |
| 3 | Online, the original six-player arena. | Only if 1 and 2 are actually fun. |
Phase 1 is the Shipaton submission. And when I do reach Phase 2, v1 stays deliberately dumb: fixed lobby (no mid-round join), one host as the single source of truth for bullet state and round start/end, no mixing local and remote. One hard problem at a time.
The real constraint isn't the deadline, it's the deadline minus Play Store review. Shipaton runs August to September; once I subtract store review and testing lead time, I have roughly three to four weeks of actual build time. That's not a multiplayer budget. It's a "make one loop feel great" budget.
What I'm doing this week
- Player movement that doesn't feel like dragging a fridge
- A bullet that fires, travels, and sticks on impact instead of despawning
- Walking over a stuck bullet to pick it back up
- One ugly test room to prove the loop: shoot → miss → walk → retrieve → shoot again
If those four things work, I have a game. Everything after that is content and polish.
The part I'm least sure about
Game feel. I can make a rectangle move. I have no idea yet how to make it feel good to move — the acceleration curves, the screen shake, the hit pause, the tiny delays that separate a prototype from something you want to keep playing. That's the skill I don't have, and it's the one this mechanic lives or dies on.
Thanks to everyone in r/Unity2D who took the time. Asking cost me an afternoon and saved me, conservatively, three weeks of building the wrong thing.
Follow along
I'll post a devlog for every meaningful step — including the parts where I get it wrong, because a Build in Public log where everything goes fine is just marketing.
Next post: whether a bullet that sticks to a wall is as easy as it sounds. (It was not.)
Building One Bullet Arena for Shipaton 2026. Unity 6, 2D URP, RevenueCat, Android, and no prior game development experience whatsoever.
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