The Billion Dollar Game Development Industry | Polishing up to make an ENTRANCE
Day by day, the field of game development elevates with intriguing novelties and transformations, attracting youth and building a multi million dollar worth industry even raising an own subculture around it.
As sources suggest,
- The video games market is expected to be worth over 90 billion U.S. dollars by 2020, from nearly 78.61 billion in 2017. (BestTheNews, 2016)
- There are more than 2.5 billion video gamers from all over the world. (The European Mobile Game Market, 2016)
- 80% of the total video game industry’s 36 billion U.S dollars revenue in 2017 belongs to software sales. (Entertainment Software Association, NPD Group, 2017)
- By investing heavily in game companies, Tencent made the most revenue from games with a revenue of 7.4 billion U.S. dollars during the first half of 2017. Riot, Activision, and Blizzard, are among the key investments they made. (NewZoo, 2017)
- Asia Pacific reached a revenue of 51.2 billion U.S. dollars, making them the largest gaming market in 2017. (NewZoo, 2017)
When it comes to video games, it is known that it being diversified into categories as,
- PC Gaming
- Console Gaming
- Mobile Gaming
- Online Gaming
- Esport
Here’s when LiveRoom comes into play.
Dihara Wijethunga, software engineer at LiveRoom who is an expert in graphic based software development took the lead with a team of other personals, discussed about the recently initiated game project with the sole purpose of polishing up for the next big thing of the company and future of LiveRoom game development.
Kick-off
Demo game was initiated as a practice project to expand our skills and experience in the field of game development. We decided to tackle a project with Unreal Engine 4 in order to be comfortable with it for future projects, as some of the team considered Unity to be their strongest suit.
Our main intentions were to develop skills within Unreal Engine 4 and to establish a game development pipeline within the company.
Coming up with the idea.
As huge fans of old-school arena shooters such as Quake III: Arena and Unreal Tournament and therefore naturally our initial idea was to create a first person arena shooter in the vein of those classics. But unfortunately due to the limited time frame we had, we realized that it wasn’t realistic to create the first person animations required for such a game from scratch. Therefore instead, we opted for an over-the-shoulder Gears of War style third person shooter with AI enemies.
Technologies used
The game engine that we used was Unreal Engine 4 which is one of the leading game engines in the computer graphics and games industries used by many AAA development studios to create blockbuster games with multi-million dollar budgets.
Adapting to new technologies
Adapting to Unreal Engine 4 took a shorter time frame than we had initially predicted mainly due to the fact that the team was already skilled at Unity. These concepts in Unity, although with different names, mapped relatively easily to the Unreal Engine 4 concepts. Because of this, the learning curve was greatly reduced.
Adhered process
The main process was to make the programmers and artists be as independent as possible. During the initial phase of the project, the programmers worked on prototyping and implementing game play features while the artists blocked out the level design.
Once level blocking was completed, we merged the game play implementation and the level blackout so that the team had a playable build of the game. From this point on the programmers started working on level scripting and tweaking game play elements while the artists started to model the final assets which will eventually replaced the placeholders in the level blackout.
Challenges faced and overcoming them
Keeping a consistent theme and art style for all materials was a welcome challenge for the artists as they had not tackled a Sci-Fi inspired project.
We initially compiled a large set of reference images that represented the art style we wanted to archive. Then through trial-and-error we achieved consistency across the assets. If an asset looked out of place, we’d iterate upon it till it fit the rest of the level.
Future plans.
In time, we wish to improve of the art assets and AI. Online multiplayer support is also high on the list of features we’d like to implement in the future.
For those who are interested, visit this link to see a demo play through : https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6450659922567880704
On behalf of Team LiveRoom, written by Durga Yasas, Umrah Musaffer and Achala Weerasooriya
