Game Developer - December_2012.pdf

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T H E
L E A D I N G
G A M E
I N D U S T R Y
M A G A Z I N E
V O L 1 9
N O 1 2
A N I M A T E
R E A L I S T I C
S W O R D P L A Y
2 0 1 2
I N
R E V I E W
D E C E M B E R
2 0 1 2
P O S T M O R T E M
SHAPES
NetherRealm Brings the
Fight to DC Super Heroes
with Unreal Engine 3
NetherRealm Studios has been
working with Unreal Engine 3 (UE3)
technology since it was part of
Midway Entertainment. The Chicago-
based studio has focused on fighting
games, establishing itself with the
bestselling
Mortal Kombat
franchise.
After exploring a hit crossover a few
years ago with
Mortal Kombat vs. DC
Universe,
the Warner Bros. Interactive
Entertainment-owned developer has
returned to comic book lore with the
original fighter,
Injustice: Gods Among
Us.
The game, which features iconic
super heroes including the Dark
Knight, the Man of Steel, Wonder
Woman and Catwoman, was designed
using Unreal Engine technology.
“We’re always making advance-
ments,” said Ed Boon, creative di-
rector, NetherRealm Studios. “This
game has much more dynamic lights
in terms of lighting the environments
and the characters. It showcases a
lot more detail than what we had go-
ing in the last
Mortal Kombat
game.”
Boon said his team has made
optimizations that particularly cater
to the fighting genre, since games
such as
Mortal Kombat
and
Injus-
tice
feature large characters that rely
on heavy motion capture animation.
“We have a faster rendering engine,
so we can put more on the screen running
at 60 frames per second,” he explained.
“We have a great memory manager that
lets us have multiple arenas for any fight,
so you can knock someone from one
arena into the next.
Injustice
is reaping the
benefits from all of these steps forward
that we took since
Mortal Kombat.”
In addition, Boon said that
NetherRealm has crafted a scripting
system for implementing animations and
moves specifically for its fighting games.
“This is proprietary technology that
we’ve added to Epic’s engine. It’s a more
code-based component than a visual
interface, so it lets us iterate, speeding
up animation, slowing down changing
collisions and all that. And it allows us to
do all of that with a very fast turnaround.”
“With
Injustice,
we can
put characters in and start
animating right off the bat.”
Boon said that the team’s experience
with Unreal Engine technology over
all of these years has made it easier
to add these types of modifications.
“UE3 gives us a great way to start off
running,” said Boon. “With
Injustice,
we
can put characters in and start animating
right off the bat. We’re improving
the systems with each iteration.”
UE3 has allowed the developer to
focus on innovating the fighter genre.
While the last
Mortal Kombat
game
was the best-selling in franchise history,
the studio sought to make something
completely original this time around.
“Our main goal was to do another
fighting game that was completely
different than
Mortal Kombat,”
said
Boon. “When we joined the Warner
Bros. family, we looked at their wealth
of intellectual properties and the DC
heroes seemed like a great fit for it. We
had actually worked with them before
on
Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe
and we wanted to do something that
was focused on celebrating the whole
exaggerated world of super heroes.
“So instead of doing things like
swinging a sword, you swing a car.
Instead of knocking somebody down, you
throw them through a building. We really
wanted to exaggerate all these events
and create this hyper-realistic battle of the
gods’ world and that’s what
Injustice
is.”
Injustice: Gods Among Us
is one
of 2013’s highly anticipated UE3-
powered
blockbuster
releases.
Thanks to Ed Boon at NetherRealm for speaking with freelance
reporter John Gaudiosi for this story.
UPCOMING EPIC ATTENDED EVENTS
D.I.C.E Summit
Las Vegas, NV
February 5-8, 2013
Cloud Gaming Europe
London, UK
February 21-22, 2013
Please email licensing@epicgames.com for appointments
© 2012, Epic Games, Inc. Epic, Epic Games, Unreal, Unreal Developer Network, UDN, Unreal Engine, and UE3 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Epic Games, Inc. in the United States of America and
elsewhere. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.
www.unrealengine.com
CONTENTS.1212
VOLUME 19 NUMBER 12
p o s t m o r t e m
d e p a r t m e n t s
26 SOUND SHAPES
Making a game built around making music (and having fun doing it) is
incredibly challenging, but Queasy Games’s
S
OUND
S
HAPES
made it look easy.
Building
S
OUND
S
HAPES
was far from easy, though—underneath its elegant
design lies dozens of discarded prototypes and small-studio growing pains.
By Mathew Kumar
f e a t u r e s
2
4
GAMEPLAN
By Patrick Miller
[EDITORIAL]
[NEWS]
2012 In Games
HEADS UP DISPLAY
By Staff
Front Line Award finalists and a homemade 8-bit assembly
compiler
33 TOOLBOX
By Mike de la Flor
[REVIEW]
[PROGRAMMING]
[ART]
[DESIGN]
[SOUND]
[BUSINESS]
[EDITORIAL]
[NEWS]
Autodesk Mudbox 2013
36 THE INNER PRODUCT
By Eddie Cameron
Recording Unity
6
YEAR IN REVIEW
It was nice knowing you, 2012!
Game Developer
rings out the year by asking
a selection of accomplished developers about the new stuff they love, the old
stuff they’re glad to get rid of, and more.
By Staff
41 PIXEL PUSHER
By Steve Theodore
Cheek by Jowl
44 DESIGN OF THE TIMES
By VandenBerghe
The Four Fs of Game Design
47 AURAL FIXATION
By Damian Kastbauer
13 THE ART OF WAR
Military shooter creators routinely consult military experts, but designers of
games featuring swordplay or other forms of melee weapon-based combat
rarely go to the medieval weapons experts. Medieval martial arts specialist
John Clements and animator Eben Bradstreet show you how understanding
realistic sword combat can make your game better (and easier to animate).
By John Clements and Eben Bradstreet
21 BEYOND SHADOWS OF DOUBT
Shadows in 3D games don’t always play nicely with other ways artists make
their games look good, especially when you look at how the shadow falls on
the model that’s casting it. 3D experts Andrew Woo and Pierre Poulin explain
four workarounds for common self-shadowing issues.
By Andrew Woo and
Pierre Poulin
Death of an Audio Engine
49 THE BUSINESS
By Kim Pallister
The 2012 Changelog
50 INSERT CREDIT
By Brandon Sheffield
The Avant-Game
52 GDC NEWS
By Staff
IGF 2013 hits record number of entries, and GDC 2013 opens
registration
53 GOOD JOB
By Alexandra Hall
[CAREER]
[EDUCATION]
[HUMOR]
Going indie in Mexico City, new studios, and who went where
54 EDUCATED PLAY
By Alexandra Hall
N
EVERMIND
56 ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
By M. Wasteland and M. Underland
Stack Trace and the Death of A.A.A. Development, Part I
WWW.GDMAG.COM
1
game plaN
GAME PLAN
//
BRANDON SHEFFIELD
patrick miller
game developer
magaziNe
w w w. g d m a g . c o m
2012 in games
The pasT year of video games in Three sTories
due to the whims of the print-
publishing biz, you’ll be reading
this with a holiday-appropriate
seasonal drink in hand, safely
insulated from december
weather, but i’m writing this in
early november. it’s a sunny
85 degrees outside in san
francisco, the U.s. elections
haven’t happened yet, and people
are just starting to tweet about
Wreck-It Ralph—certainly
not
ideal conditions for writing a year-
end wrap-up column.
so instead of casting
about for wise words on the
game industry’s past year
(Crowdfunding! studio closures!
mobile games!), i’ll leave the
year-end stuff to our esteemed
contributors and colleagues in
our year in review feature, and
instead list three moments that
defined 2012 in games for me.
on the other hand, made me feel
a little sick—and considering that
demo capped off a long reel of
ultraviolence, a little bit worried for
the state of triple-a games.
in retrospect, i remember that
moment less for my cynicism in
the moment, and more for the
chills that ran down my spine.
emotionally evocative moments
in and around games are to be
treasured, i think—even if that
emotion is disgust.
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pallister, matthew Wasteland, magnus Underland
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Where everyone knoWs
your name
»
i attended gdC online this year,
just in time for us to say goodbye
to austin (see gdC news, page
52) . on our second night there, i
went to a “barcade” called recess
with gamasutra editors Kris graft
and frank Cifaldi. We tried to play
T
eenaGe
M
UTanT
n
inja
T
UrTLes
: T
he
a
rcaDe
G
aMe
, but it just wasn’t
happening; the beer was good, but
the broken controls kind of killed
it, and arcade beat-em-ups aren’t
nearly as fun when they’re on
free-play mode (a lesson for free-
to-play developers, perhaps!).
The next night, i joined a
few dedicated arcade-goers in
a nighttime jaunt to arcadeUfo,
austin’s go-to arcade with
genuine Japanese-style head-
to-head fighting game setups,
P
oP
’n M
Usic
cabinets, and even a
P
ac
-M
an
B
aTTLe
r
oyaLe
four-player
setup. The money these days
might be all up in the massively
multiplayer crowdfunded
casualcore mobile/social/free-to-
play markets, but there is simply
nothing like the experience of
walking into a room far from
home and throwing down in some
M
arveL vs
. c
aPcoM
until you’ve
made some new friends.
game of phones
»
i had the good luck to serve
as a judge on the panel for Tokyo
game show’s 2012 sense of
Wonder night, which is the show’s
accompanying independent
game showcase event.
M
eMory
of a
B
roken
D
iMension
walked us
through haunting vistas of an
alien world;
G
ranDMasTer
looked
into the life of homeless people in
Ukraine; i could go on and on, but
i’ll stick to talking about one of
my favorite games there.
T
aiso
,
by Japanese dev team
Zacozaco, is very simple. it’s an
iphone game where you control
a gymnast—“Taiso” means
“gymnastics” in Japanese—and
you launch that gymnast a
certain distance by using your
iphone’s accelerometer. Basically,
it’s an iphone game about
throwing your iphone as high in
the air as possible.
naturally,
T
aiso
is full of
emotionally evocative moments;
the thrill of throwing your iphone
in the air, the relief when you
catch it intact, the loss and regret
when you don’t. The fact that
three independent devs—two
of which spent the development
period going to girlie bars and
all-you-can-eat barbecue joints,
according to the presentation—
can whip up a game in Unity that
hits us in the feels harder than
any major 2012 title gives me lots
of hope for 2013.
execution at e3
»
personally, i’ve never been
particularly worried about the
effects of violent video games
on younger players, or people in
general—in my opinion, anything
over-the-top or tasteless in
games tends to be present in
far larger amounts in the rest of
popular culture. But if there was
ever a moment where i stopped
to think about it, it would have
to be during the sony press
conference at this year’s e3,
when a stadium full of grown men
and women watched the virtual
point-blank shotgun execution of
a man pleading for his life during
the
T
he
L
asT of
U
s
demo and
immediately erupted in applause.
on one hand, that moment
was completely understandable;
it was a pitch-perfect moment
for a demo, and if i had been
sitting in a friend’s living room
watching that same sequence, i
probably would have reacted with
enthusiasm. hearing thousands of
people cheering at that moment,
2
»
i have no doubt that 2013
will bring us a new truckload of
buzzwords that promise even-
more-photorealistic graphics
tech, more daUs/maUs/arpUs/
arppUs, and consoles with bigger
gBs than last year’s—and it’ll be
our collective job to sort out the
wheat from the chaff. But when i
remember 2012, i’m not going to
remember a buzzword; i’m going
to remember the games i played,
the people i played them with,
and how they (the games
and
the
people) made me feel.
—patrick miller
@pattheflip
on to the next one
game developer | december 2012
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