What we set out to prove
Prove that a real first-person shooter - proper aim, real gunplay feel, readable combat - could run smoothly on a mid-range phone without turning into a slideshow the moment a firefight got busy.
What made it hard
Touch-based aiming is the single hardest problem in mobile FPS design. Virtual sticks are imprecise, gyro-aim alienates players who don't want to tilt their phone in public, and most "solutions" quietly nerf the game into something that isn't really an FPS anymore.
How we solved it
We prototyped seven different aim-assist curves before picking one, testing each against players who'd never touched a mobile shooter and players who lived on console FPS. We tuned magnetism (how strongly the reticle "sticks" near a target) separately from correction (how much the game nudges a near-miss into a hit) so the game stayed skill-based instead of aiming itself. On the performance side, we hand-tuned LOD and shadow distance per device tier rather than shipping one universal quality setting, so a three-year-old phone gets a game built for it - not a scaled-down version of one built for a flagship.
What shipped
Signal Zero shipped holding a stable 60fps on our minimum-spec target device, with combat that mobile FPS veterans described as "actually fair" rather than "actually easy." It became the anchor title for our Unity pipeline - the aim-assist system we built for it now ships in every shooter we make.
UnityC#Universal Render PipelineCustom input/aim-assist framework
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