INFINITY BLADE AND BEYOND THE FUTURE OF MOBILE GAMES GEREMY MUSTARD | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
Jul 18, 2015
INFINITY BLADE AND
BEYONDTHE FUTURE OF MOBILE GAMES
GEREMY MUSTARD | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR
INFINITY BLADE
• (Fun facts about IB in Korea… pending)
WHY MAKE PHONE
GAMES?
• Huge install base
• 2.2 billion dollar,
rapidly growing market
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
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
THE HARDWARE
• Comparable to
last gen consoles
• Will surpass
current gen
consoles within 3
years
• Tons of memory
• Touch screens
MAKE IT PRETTY!
• Emphasis on close-up
characters
• Cinematic
presentation
• Uncluttered screen
• The world was our
story
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
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
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
BAKED LIGHTING
• Global illumination
• Ambient occlusion
• Baked-in normal maps
• Custom painted details
LIGHTMAPS
BAKED
NORMALS
CUSTOM
MODULATE
LIGHTMAPS
BAKED
NORMALS
CUSTOM
MODULATE
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
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
Platforms in 2002
Consoles
PC Handheld
Mainstream Gaming
PlayStation 2
GameCube
Xbox
GameBoy
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
Browser Games
Windows Phone 7
DREAM BIG
• Modern mobile hardware + scalable
engines allows for easy cross-platform
development
• What kind of experiences will that allow?
DREAM REALLY BIG
2 BILLION consoles in
people’s pockets within 4
years!!!