CatchUp is an online co-op game where players climb a tower of increasingly strange catching challenges together, and fall a long way when it goes wrong.
It grew out of the studio's first project, Swipers, reusing its networking, player, audio and platform layers, and went from pitch to a public Steam demo in about two months.
What I built
Netcode
Host-authoritative Photon Fusion 2 with client-predicted physics. The world is a pure function of two networked values, a seed and the climb progress, so a late joiner rebuilds the whole scene from a few bytes. I led the client-stutter work: rendering remote players in their own timeframe, scheduling collider drops and hazards on the network tick, and cutting per-player state by about a quarter.
Release pipeline
One command takes a Plastic SCM changeset to a versioned Unity build, compresses and uploads it, pushes it to a Steam branch and posts it to the team's Discord.
Live-ops foundations
Opt-out telemetry feeding a private backoffice of live rooms and sessions. Crash reporting with build-tagged breadcrumbs and Discord alerts. Steam achievements, cloud save and leaderboards. Controller support, rebinding and localization.
Gameplay systems
The player movement rework, scoring, and the original catch and throw tech the game is built on.
Result
Steam demo live since August 31, 2026. Steam Next Fest, October 19 to 26. Full launch on November 11, 2026.
Catching Mr. Daruma's throw
Ring throw
Slide catch
Climbing a cracking wall
Gold ball shatter
The tower from the bottom