Infinity Blade and beyond
- 1. INFINITY BLADE AND BEYOND THE FUTURE OF MOBILE GAMES GEREMY MUSTARD | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
- 2. INFINITY BLADE • (Fun facts about IB in Korea… pending)
- 3. WHY MAKE PHONE GAMES? • Huge install base • 2.2 billion dollar, rapidly growing market
- 4. Global Mobile App Store Rankings (Ranking by revenue in millions of dollars) 2010 Rank Store 2009 Revenue 2010 Revenue Annual Growth 1Apple App Store $769 $1,782 131.9% 2BlackBerry App World $36 $165 360.3% 3Nokia Ovi Store $13 $105 719.4% 4Google Android Market $11 $102 861.5% Total $829 $2,154 160.2% Source: IHS Screen Digest February 2011
- 5. WHY MAKE PHONE GAMES? • Huge install base • 2.2 billion dollar, rapidly growing market • Over 50% of that revenue comes from games • The hardware is ready for games we like to make
- 6. THE HARDWARE • Comparable to last gen consoles • Will surpass current gen consoles within 3 years • Tons of memory • Touch screens
- 7. MAKE IT PRETTY! • Emphasis on close-up characters • Cinematic presentation • Uncluttered screen • The world was our story
- 8. MAKE IT FUN! • Can play whole game with One Finger – Find ways to get input, then get that finger out of the way • Super short session core gameplay – Meaningful, fun, and progressive every 2 minutes • Original, Unique, Device Specific design – If your game would be great with a controller, you are making the wrong game • Easy to grasp, difficult to master – Truly skill based
- 9. CHARACTERS • Lighting – Per-vertex specular looks bad on characters – Per-pixel specular from sum of diffuse RGB to save memory – Spherical Harmonics from baked GI • Low verts, HUGE texture maps – 3000 verts, 2048 textures • Low bone count • 2 weights per vert • One draw call – Merged meshes and texture atlas for hero character
- 12. ENVIRONMENT • Keep draw calls down – Combine meshes that use the same texture and shader – Aggressive culling • Custom painted cards for distance – Lower draw calls – Simulate depth of field • Colored lightmaps for distant meshes to simulate fog • Delete unseen polygons – Fixed cameras allowed us to be super aggressive
- 13. BAKED LIGHTING • Global illumination • Ambient occlusion • Baked-in normal maps • Custom painted details
- 14. LIGHTMAPS
- 15. BAKED
- 16. CUSTOM
- 17. LIGHTMAPS
- 18. BAKED
- 19. CUSTOM
- 20. OTHER OPTIMIZATIONS • Getting around lack of precompiled shaders • Next gen particle systems are not cheap – Automated flipbook texture creation from expensive animated materials • Precomputed visibility sets • Considerations for different devices – Screen resolution vs memory – Per-pixel rendering performance
- 21. SCALABILITY • Plan ahead for hardware advances • How easy was it to support iPad 2? – Content was ready (high res textures) – Only changed 4 settings! • Set textures to use highest resolution mip-maps • Turned on advanced character lighting • Turned on MSAA • Turned on 2nd CPU core • Why so easy? – Scalable engine settings (must scale between mobile, console, PC) – Content built with near future in mind
- 24. Platforms in 2002 Consoles PC Handheld Mainstream Gaming PlayStation 2 GameCube Xbox GameBoy
- 25. Platforms in 2012 Consoles PC, Mac Native Handheld MMO Mainstream Gaming Xbox 360 Wii PlayStation 3 Mobile/Phone iPhone/iPad Android Nintendo 3DS Sony NGPKinect XBLA PSN Web Gaming Social Network Gaming Faceboo k Twitter Browser Games Windows Phone 7
- 26. DREAM BIG • Modern mobile hardware + scalable engines allows for easy cross-platform development • What kind of experiences will that allow?
- 27. DREAM REALLY BIG 2 BILLION consoles in people’s pockets within 4 years!!!