How Oxobox Games built a data-driven board to power Sente’s six-player strategy | Unity

From a tabletop hobby to a decade-plus in Unity

Sente is Oxobox’s first game; the studio also works in film and TV post-production, providing subtitling, dubbing, and quality control for the entertainment industry. However, Sente actually predates the studio completely. The original idea grew from sketches and paper prototypes the team – who are friends outside work – started tinkering with in the 1990s, based on an idea from game designer Javier Mrad. The first playable attempts were built in Flash as a two-player game, with a brief detour into HTML5 canvas before they landed on Unity.

“I kind of felt at home with Unity right away, though I’m not sure why – I don’t even remember what it was about Flash that felt similar,” Fernando says. “At the time, Unity also supported JavaScript, which felt a lot friendlier than jumping straight into C++ for something like Unreal Engine. Once JavaScript and Boo were deprecated, we moved over to C# for good – and I still love working in Unity today.”

That jump to Unity (starting out in 4.0 LTS, as Fernando recalls) is also when Sente moved from a 2D prototype to the fully 3D board players see today. The team has kept upgrading ever since, and now develops Sente in Unity 6.