Planning Games for Everybody

The idea of bringing games to everyone runs deep at Tandem Games. Aaron sums it up, saying, "We want our games to be playable by anyone, and we found in alpha testing that Crunch Time really needed a discrete graphics card to run. It just didn't make sense to release a game that many of our own friends and family couldn't play."

From a business perspective, they determined that it was a strategic imperative to support Intel Graphics, in order to reach the largest possible audience.

The development team dug deeply into the resources that they had available to them as members of the Intel Software Partner Program and quantified the specific challenges they faced in optimizing Crunch Time, setting out a strategy to address each of those challenges in turn:

• Texture size. When they started the optimization process, the team discovered that some of the game's textures were missing when the game was played under Intel Graphics. It soon became clear that this issue was simply because the textures were sized at 2048 x 2048 and needed to fit within the constraint of 512 x 512.
  
  They decided to address that issue by cutting the textures up and tiling them together so they could display properly.
• Texture quantity. Another initial issue was that, in many places, gameplay was slowed down by the use of overlapping textures, including some that were being displayed at less than full size.
  
  Both those issues had arisen during the evolution of game development without anyone paying much attention to them. The resulting inefficiency was simple enough to remedy by a combination of merging multiple textures together and scaling source images appropriately, in order to save on video memory.
• Rendering efficiency. A significant limitation to the game's frame rate when they began the optimization process was an excessive amount of 3D rendering being done at runtime.
  
  The load on video resources was significant, and the team quickly realized that they could significantly reduce this factor by pre-rendering some of the 3D graphics, simulating them using 2D images.

With this set of goals in mind, the Crunch Time development team had created a recipe for a far more efficient game than the one they had started with. Despite a bit of a tradeoff in terms of the resultant code size, they now had their goal in sight-a game that would produce excellent results on Intel Graphics-based platforms.

Automation for the Real World

Having decided to let the continuing development of Intel Graphics help drive their business model, and having identified the tasks before them, Tandem next needed to create an efficient methodology.

Looking at the work before them, they saw lots of repetitive tasks, and conspiring against tedium, their thoughts moved to batch processing. Torque Game Builder, their game engine of choice, provided much of the functionality they needed, but it didn't natively provide the automation they wanted.

In a matter of about three days, the team was able to write a series of C# tools that worked with Torque to batch process most of the operations described above, which relieved the team of boredom and let them get home at a reasonable hour most nights.

They completed the optimization in three or four weeks, and as a result, their audience is much larger than it would have been if they had not undertaken this part of the development process-all in all, a good deal.

"Since our business is based on a free-to-play model, we have a bigger user load [for Domain of Heroes] than subscription-based games, so scalability is vital, and we depend on Intel to help us with that."

Aaron Murray
Co-Founder, Tandem Games

Tandem Games' Crunch Time exemplifies the notion of making games accessible to everyone by providing a world-class user experience on mainstream hardware. As one would guess from their status as the contest winner, a key element of that effort is the in-depth set of optimizations the company made to ensure best use of Intel Graphics.

As a result of those optimizations, Aaron says, "We got the biggest audience possible, and thanks to the Intel Partner Program, we were able to pull that off without making any real compromises in terms of image clarity or resolution. It runs faster now, too."