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Postmortem: Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz  Risk in Innovation
We made a lot of technological gambles when creating RoboBlitz and luckily, they’re all paying off. Early on, some of our friends in the industry said that building a game based on completely physically driven characters was impossible for a new team to pull off. After much hard work, we did manage to pull it off and it allowed us to implement innovative weapons like the P2P Beam, a band of elastic energy you can use to connect any two moveable objects in the game. Because all the characters are driven by physics, it means you can use the P2P to rubber band three bad guys together, and watch them squiggle around like a giant worm while you pick them off one by one. Or, you can spring them into a giant shredder or one of many other spots where a baddie wouldn't like to be. The P2P, along with many of our other unique tools and weapons, wouldn't have been possible without our physical animation system. We're also getting a lot of press for being one of the first Unreal Engine 3 games out, and that's another significant tech risk that is paying off. Developing the game at the same time UE3 was being developed was non-trivial. The engine is great, but it wasn't fully functional when we started work on RoboBlitz a year ago. We were putting all of our eggs in Epic's basket by relying on them to come out with features we needed by the time we needed them. Sometimes we had to implement the features ourselves while we were waiting, but in the end, this too was worth the risk. With zero marketing budget, being the first UE3 game to ship was a great publicity tool.
Finally, shipping a 19 level next-gen game in less than 50MB took a lot of clever tricks and techniques. From integrating the untested ProFX into our game, to making sure all animation was procedural (and thus very well compressed), to tweaking our package compression routines, to looping sections of our music just right, to the masterful UV kung-fu of our artists – it took a lot of hard work to keep our game under 50MB. It helped tremendously that we planned for this right from the start, but there were definitely times we weren't sure we were going to make it. It was immensely comforting that last day when we built up our final package and it came in just shy of 50MB. Since most of the buzz we're generating is around our Xbox Live Arcade release, we feel the risk here was very worth it and all that hard work on file shrinkage is going to pay off. Licensing Good TechTwo of the smartest choices we made on this project were licensing Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 and using Allegorithmic's ProFX procedural texture generation tool. UE3 is simply beautiful. It has the capability to power next-gen games, and it's designed to be modified and extended in any way its licensees need. None of our programmers were graphics experts coming into the project, so licensing the engine gave us a huge leg up graphically. However, it's not just the feature set which makes the engine great, but the team behind it. The tech guys at Epic are very friendly and supportive, and just a pleasure to work with. Building a completely physics based game around UE3 took some extreme modification to the engine, but whenever we had a question about the inner workings into which we were hacking, someone at Epic was always ready and able to help us out.
Allegorithmic's ProFX procedural texturing tool might have a little less publicity than UE3, but it was instrumental in shipping RoboBlitz for the Xbox Live Arcade platform. As we mentioned, Live Arcade has a 50MB limit for their games, and there's no way all the textures in RoboBlitz could have fit within that limit without procedural generation. Using ProFX, we were able to generate 80 percent of the textures for each level at load-time, which allowed us a much greater palette of textures when decorating the levels. This helped tremendously when it came to squishing 19 levels of a 3D, next-gen game down into 50MB. Similar to our experience with Epic, the Allegorithmic team was also very helpful and knowledgeable. It was great working with them. |
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