Optimizing Deep Rock Galactic Survivor for mobile

Unity details how Piktiv brought Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor to mobile while the PC version was still in active development. The port had to survive on hardware with a fraction of the CPU, GPU, and memory budget, including a 3 GB iPad target with roughly 1,850 MB available before the game would tip over.

The biggest wins came from attacking systems that scale with enemy count. Damage numbers moved from TextMesh Pro GameObjects to a particle-based number sheet, enemy movement shifted from NavMesh-style per-agent pathing to flow fields, and spatial queries were pushed toward a KD-tree approach. For the swarm of animated enemies, the team baked animation frames into textures and drove them with GPU vertex animation, which also made instancing practical.

Testing was built around repeatable device scenarios rather than ad hoc play sessions. The team created six automated benchmarks covering idle, enemy-heavy, and weapon-heavy cases across biomes, then tracked CPU, GPU, and memory on a low-tier target device that needed to hold 30 fps. That kind of instrumentation is especially relevant for mobile teams shipping effects-heavy games, where one bad spike can be the difference between playable and crash-prone.

The port also stayed on a one-way merge path: changes flow from PC into mobile, but not back again. That kept the mobile branch free to make destructive optimization choices, while Unity support helped with some of the deeper engine-side experiments. For developers, it’s a useful reminder that mobile success often depends as much on branch strategy and measurement...