TINY METAL: Developing a big game with a small team AREA35 - GIAN PEIRCE - BIZDEV & LOCALIZATION AREA35 - DANIEL DRESSLER - CHIEF ENGINEER

Transcription

1 TINY METAL: Developing a big game with a small team AREA35 - GIAN PEIRCE - BIZDEV & LOCALIZATION AREA35 - DANIEL DRESSLER - CHIEF ENGINEER

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3 About This Presentation Development of TINY METAL started early 2016, released Christmas 2017 and continues to this day. This presentation covers aspects of TINY METAL s development which are cleared for public release. Presented by - Gian Peirce - Daniel Dressler

4 STAFF INTRODUCTIONS Gian Carlo Peirce Daniel Business Development & Localisation Supervisor Chief Programmer & Gameplay Director Gian was raised in the United Kingdom where he first received his first console, the NES, from his mother for his exceptional grades at very young age. Mr. Peirce took the very much roundabout way into the games industry, having graduated from the University of Sheffield's management school, working for his father's company, becoming a teacher in Tokyo Japan, then joining the team at AREA35. Gian believes very much in the business practices of maximum efficiency, the Tayloristic approach to managements principles, and is a firm believer in the Japanese corporate ethos of "Kaizen", or continuous improvement. Daniel was born in a small Canadian town and never expected to live in a megapolis like Tokyo. He started programming video games as a hobby as a kid. Going through University he focused on Operating Systems development in pursuit of complex software challenges. After graduation, he entered the Japanese games industry with the idea to leverage the lessons from systems software.

5 TINY METAL: PROJECT DETAILS PUBLISHER SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT / UNTIES PLATFORMS SWITCH PLAYSTATION 4 WINDOWS / MAC Languages English, French, German, Chinese (traditional+simplified), Italian & Spanish. Korean & Russian will be released soon! GENRE Turn Based Strategy PLAY MODES SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN / SKIRMISH ONLINE MULTIPLAYER LOCAL MULTIPLAYER (Nintendo Switch Only) UNREAL ENGINE VERSIONS 4.9 ~ 4.19

6 What we will talk about... - Real Time Rendering: The Future of Cinematics - How to get the most out of the UE - The Architecture of TINY METAL - LiveData: The data is alive - Optimizing TINY METAL for the Nintendo Switch - Traditional 3 Point Lighting Versus Modern Lighting Methods - Leveraging UMG for Consistent UI Styling - NavibleMenu: Cross-platform UI Framework

7 Real Time Rendering: The Future of Cinematics

8 CINEMATICS I would like to make a movie! - High production values - Able to convey your whole world in seconds - Something that has impact and is cool

9 CINEMATICS Up until now - Making movies was a complicated and involved process - Exorbitant costs - They simply took a long time to make!

10 CINEMATICS I am an Indie Developer, yet I still want to make a movie for my game What should I do?

11 CINEMATICS REAL-TIME RENDERED CINEMATICS

12 CINEMATICS Making movies using the game engine! (in our case Unreal)

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14 CINEMATICS The Advantages of RTR - Can be made in an inordinately short amount of time - Iterations can be rapidly produced-which means feedback and other changes can be rapidly incorporated - This in turn allows greater freedom of artistic experimentation. - The workflow is easy to understand - A compositor is not required since all assets are rendered in real-time!

15 CINEMATICS In conclusion Low Costs Quick production times High Quality

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17 How to get the most out of the UNREAL ENGINE Use standard stuff + make your own special sauce

18 Use the Standard Stuff - ACharacter, Pawns, Actors, Camera Arm. - Learn to use what UE4 provides - Do not worry when you see the sweet customizations people are doing on Twitter. Focus on getting the basics right.

19 Find & Make your own Special Sauce - For TINY METAL our Special Sauce is BattleCore - BattleCore is designed for TBS game logic. - Gameplay is the core value of TINY METAL, so our time went into making BattleCore special. - Everything else is standard UE4

20 The Architecture of TINY METAL How we use Pawns/Actors/GameMode and our own BattleCore system

21 Overview of Major Components in TINY METAL - UNREAL ENGINE 4 Rendering & Visuals & Interactions User Interface & Networking & Platform Support - BattleCore TBS Logic & State - LiveData Content & Rules

22 Overview of our UNREAL ENGINE Nouns - Units are Actors - Units only have code for animations - Player Interaction logic is in Pawn - Player Controller is mostly empty - GameMode handles all initialization - Only Player Pawns are network synchronized

23 Integration of UNREAL ENGINE 4 & BattleCore - GameMode owns authoritative BattleCore instance and AI - Only Player Pawns are network synchronized - No Physics used - Units and Terrain are owned by Client - Units and Terrain are never network syncronized - BattleCore is network synchronized through Event passing

24 How BattleCore Replicates State - 100% Event Based - Each player (Human, AI, plus GameMode) owns a Simulate instance - Feeds Events to Simulate instance - Human, AI, and GameMode state is always seperated

25 Benefits of BattleCore Structure - 1 Code Path for Normal play, Loading & Saving, and Networked play - Networked play is debugged at same time as normal play - Random-ness is allowed in visuals - Simulation always appears 0ms latency to players - Robust, disconnects get replaced by AI - Massive unit counts = Not a problem

26 LiveData: The data is alive

27 Overview of Data Driven Code - Benefits & Common methods - All content comes from data - All parameters come from data - Composition is essential - Game designer need not be a programmer

28 How LiveData is Special - Live reload (Hence the name) - Shared access and collaboration - Compact on-disk format - Seamless support for dev builds without rebuilding or new binaries

29 Idea Behind LiveData - Google Spreadsheet - I saw a planner with a tablet and I thought: wouldn t it be wonderful if he could tune the game even from his tablet? - Japanese planners love using spreadsheets

30 How LiveData Works - Proxy Server & Caching - Local Flatbuffer for builds & Local Cache - Parse into Facts Object - Listeners/Callbacks from updates

31 Optimizing TINY METAL for Nintendo Switch

32 First Build achieved April Build on console first ran in April 2017 & ran at 7fps

33 Optimized first under Windows - Inspected lighting and balance of GPU cycles on PC - Saw Heavy lights and lighting effects - Heavy lights had only minimal visual contribution - Removed said lights and optimized shadows

34 Optimizing our Terrain - All terrain in TINY METAL are static instanced meshes - Implemented and Optimized batching of instances to reduce over draw - Balance draw calls and vertex contribution Note: Pictured is RenderDoc, highly recommend using it.

35 November FPS on Most Maps - Lighting count is reduced - Battle scene resolution is 80% - No Bloom on Switch - Still room to improve

36 Current Progress - New simpler lighting with better use of UE4 methods - 30fps on all maps - Battle scene full resolution - Visually looks better - 1 Directional Light + Post Process-set Global Illumination

37 Traditional 3 Point Lighting Versus Modern Lighting Methods

38 What is 3 Point Lighting? -. Common practice in Japanese industry even now -. Derived from Photography and Cinematography -. Uses 3 directional lights Main, back, side

39 Downsides to 3 Point Lighting - Not physically accurate, thus diminishes PBR - Hard to make dynamic - Only can handle one lighting situation (Indoor vs Outdoor) - Expensive to Render ArchVIZ by Koola

40 Modern Lighting Methods - Skybox - Baked static lighting - Ambient Fog - Exponential Fog Screenshot of Nodge

41 Leveraging UMG for Consistent UI Styling Reusing widgets = Better than Nested Prefabs

42 Goals - Single Style made only once by UI designer - Must scale down well to smaller screens - Must be translatable - Consistent

43 Power of UMG - Better than nested prefabs - Reuse widgets like native widgets - Extend from C++ to implement LiveData powered text

44 Common UI Component - Pattern - Shaders can be used in UMG in an image slot

45 Common UI Component - Background - Served as our UI motif - Note how it uses the Common Pattern

46 Common UI Component - Buttons - Note how it uses the Common Background

47 Common UI Component - Fancy Menu - FancyMenu - Reusable menu which we used for our main menu. - Contains 3 layers of NavibleMenu widgets. - FancyMenu - FancyMenuItem - FancyMenuItemOption

48 Common UI Component - Confirm Dialog - Note how it reuses the pattern + Fancy Menu

49 NavibleMenu: Cross-platform UI Framework Keyboard / Controller / Mouse = Same Code

50 Goal: Support Keys & Controllers & Mice all at once - We needed custom control flow over UNREAL ENGINE 4 standard - Reduce bugs by having a single code path - Quick UI implementation time

51 Our Solution: NavibleMenu now Open Source - C++ - Open Source on Github Please consider using or forking. Licensed under MIT so everyone can use or learn from it.

52 Example of NavibleMenu API Key Events: - InputsOccured - ResultsOccured Pictured is ResultsOccured handling from main menu.

53 Scrollable lists using NavibleMenu API - Input -> Scroll - Results passed to owner

54 Benefits of NavibleMenu - Separation of UI behaviour from game logic - Same code path for Keys & Controllers & Mice - Easy to use - Composable, easy re-use of other Widgets - Leverages the good parts of UMG - Flexible usage

55 Should you use NavibleMenu? - Maybe. Consider writing your own mini-framework. - NavibleMenu grew bit by bit as our needs grew - Optimized for easy addition of animations - TINY METAL s UI had more animations than any other UE4 based game I have seen.

56 Thank you for listening! We hope you learned something useful!