Horseshoe Crab Rescue!

Horseshoe Crab Rescue! is a casual game for the New Nintendo 3DS™ / New Nintendo 2DS™ family with some light educational elements. The game is inspired by real-life events organized by several animal welfare and environmental groups. In the game, players walk around the beach, rescuing horseshoe crabs that have become stranded on their backs by flipping them upright. The game is available now from the Nintendo eShop: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/horseshoe-crab-rescue-3ds/

I designed, developed, and published this game in my spare time over a few months. The game was developed using the official "Unity for New Nintendo 3DS" SDK (based on Unity 5.6). As the sole developer of this game, I created most of the content from scratch, including code, shaders, menus, 2D and 3D artwork, scene design, etc. Exceptions are noted below.

Textures and 2D artwork/UI were designed in Adobe Photoshop; the final UI was assembled in the Unity Editor. 3D modeling and rigging was done in Blender, and keyframe animation in the Unity Editor. In addition to designing and creating the game, I authored an accompanying eManual with information on how to play the game, as well as educational content about horseshoe crabs.

The horseshoe crab started as a model licensed from TurboSquid, but with over 50,000 triangles, it was not suitable for use with the Nintendo 3DS system's low-power PICA200 GPU. I pared the mesh down to 2,582 tris while maintaining import details, and also created even lower-polygon LOD models. I also rigged and animated the model so that the horseshoe crab's flailing legs and flexing telson can be seen when it is on its back.

The fonts, skybox, sound effects, and music are the only assets I did not create or modify; they are all appropriately licensed from the Unity Asset Store or elsewhere.

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