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Guilty As Arrr

A multiplayer pirate social-deduction game built around proximity voice: distance and direction change who can hear you, so where you stand is part of every private conversation and accusation. I led the team, built the core systems and ran the playtests.

The ship deck in the playable build.
My role
Team lead, systems developer and playtest coordinator
Built with
Unity URP, Photon Fusion, Photon Voice 2
Challenge
Keep proximity voice and social cues readable over a network
Result
A testable multiplayer slice, rescoped and delivered within one semester

What I built

  • Proximity voice

    Photon Voice 2 attenuates speech by in-game distance and direction. I tuned the baselines for clarity and social tension, so deception and accusation both work.

  • Session flow

    Lightweight session management and round rules on Photon Fusion, kept simple so playtests stayed reliable after the rescope.

  • Spatial cues

    Balanced visual and audio feedback so players can read each other in chaotic rounds.

  • Scope and delivery

    Re-prioritised the backlog and cut non-essential features so the remaining systems could be polished and documented.

Rescoping mid-semester

Midway through, a teammate left the class. That forced a full scope reset and moved more of the implementation, testing and delivery onto me. Instead of over-promising, I narrowed the project to a working multiplayer slice we could finish and test.

  • Reframed the goal from a broad feature set to a stable multiplayer prototype.
  • Prioritised session flow, proximity voice and readable social feedback.
  • Tracked ownership and weekly priorities on Trello, re-ranking after every playtest to protect core gameplay over polish.

Playtests

My favourite part of development is watching people either play the intended loop or break it creatively. In one session a tester climbed higher than we expected using collision seams, then walked a rope like a true pirate.

Feature, not a bug, and useful data for navigation boundaries, movement readability and player freedom.

I also ran a project social account to share progress and collect playtest feedback.

A tester used collision seams to climb the rigging, then walked along a rope.
More screenshots
The ship hold: warm light and geometry players used in unexpected ways.
The ship scene in the Unity editor.
The ocean level the ship travels through.
The project's X profile for community updates.

Outcome

A testable multiplayer slice that proved the social loop and stayed realistic after the team shrank. The lesson was production judgement: with less capacity, I traded feature breadth for execution quality and still shipped something coherent and testable.