Modulus
professional projects | | linkz: Modulus on Steam
Skills Practiced: C#, Unity3D, SIMD, Optimization, Tech Art Tools Used: Unity3D
Companies/Clients: Happy Volcano
Platforms: PC
This was one of my first projects as a freelance Performance Optimization specialist. I began the engagement with Happy Volcano back in late October of 2024; they had a demo version of Modulus that had a couple of performance issues they wanted to resolve before its submission deadline.
I produced detailed profiling reports and data for review, and helped their engineering staff resolve some early “easy-win” bottlenecks by accelerating a couple of their systems with multithreaded Unity Burst code, and wrote documents about how to find performance issues going forward. I really enjoyed working with the team at Happy Volcano; they were interested in the root causes behind performance issues and structured their codebase so that they could continue to avoid any performance regressions as new features were added to the game, and they included me in their online social events so that the team and I could get to know each other well. It was really great!
Following from that first contract, we worked together in multiple following engagements from 2024 up to 2026, to help scale the game up from its playable demo all the way to its release candidate. A typical issue faced by factory automation games is that the game design demands that the player be able to scale up their operations by several orders of magnitude as the game progresses - this naturally has an impact on performance, so a lot of time was spent figuring out novel approaches to scale. The game wasn’t built with Unity’s DOTS/ECS system, so there were some CPU bottlenecks that had to do with Unity’s overall GameObject & Component backing structure that could not be completely mitigated - definitely something I’d like to write a blog post about someday, because there are a ton of strange performance pitfalls with this part of Unity that are definitely not made obvious, and show up a lot when I analyse projects. My involvement with the project finished at the end of January 2026; the scope of the game was finalized, and a full playthrough of the game had it beating their performance budget on their minimum specification machines, even when the player had made some really gigantic factories! All in all, it was a thoroughly satisfying and fun project to work on, with a team that really were all-stars. And, I really got to exercise my brain during some of the trickier problems!
Modulus releases April 2nd, 2026, on Steam. At the time of writing, it has a demo available to play!
