“Our ambition with War Games is to deliver a fun yet highly competitive experience, so lag, cheating, and long queues are unacceptable. They needed dedicated servers to guarantee a smooth, lag-free experience.įor Vladimir Zadrazil (“Zadr”), Madfinger’s lead programmer, it was a simple choice. With an eye to the future, Madfinger decided early that for a competitive first-person shooter (FPS) like Shadowgun War Games, peer-to-peer (P2P) wasn’t going to cut it. Each of these options has technical and financial advantages as well as drawbacks. How and where a studio hosts its new game is a perennial question, with options available right across the spectrum, from 100% bare metal servers to fully in the cloud. With Unity, it’s really easy – it’s just a switch in the settings and the runtime version is output for the target platform.” We can build an entire game on one code base and not have to worry about which mobile device it’s going to run on. “For me, Unity’s multiplatform capabilities simplify things quite a bit. Ondrus mentions one other popular Unity feature. To do that we use Unity tools, including the Profiler, which helps us look for unnecessary allocations and render calls, and to optimize our code in general.” They also tap the Frame Debugger and Occlusion Culling to ensure the builds are tight and the game lands just right on whatever device you’re playing on. It’s a small feature but it really speeds up their workflow.Īnother feature they like a lot is baked lighting mode, which provides two important benefits according to Ondrus, “It lets us create great atmosphere in our games without any cost to performance.”Įver mindful of how high-fidelity graphics run on player devices, Ondrus says, “We’re hyper-aware of the battery cost on mobile, so consequently we heavily optimize performance. His animators build their work in Autodesk’s MotionBuilder, and once they import their clips they can select and manipulate several keys at once to, for example, scale curves horizontally (to change the time placement) or vertically (to change the value). Ondrus also likes Unity’s Animation editor, especially the updated version of Key manipulation in Curves mode. This is handy because we can do all our work in Unity and don’t have to use another third-party software tool.” We also like to use it for grey-boxing all the levels. We use it to build our scenes quickly and iterate on them across teams. “We like ProBuilder a lot – it’s a powerful tool for prototyping new levels and assets within Unity. So, once a new title gets greenlit, how does Madfinger begin fleshing out its latest game ideas? It was the perfect combination of skills on both sides and the right timing that brought us together, which has built a very long relationship that allows us to focus on what we do best: making great games.” Luciano Alibrandi, Madfinger’s COO and acting CMO, concurs, “Ten years ago we found each other at the right moment – when Unity was growing up and Madfinger was growing up. But nowadays, Unity is fully featured, with something like 1,000-plus engineers behind it, which lets us focus on game development, not time-consuming engine-building and maintenance.” “Two decades ago when I started building games, there weren’t many third-party engines, so my friends and I had to build and maintain our own. “We simply can’t afford to have 10 people working on an engine and another 10 working on other internal tools – we need to devote all our energies to game design and making stunning visuals, which is our forté,” says Miroslav Ondrus, Madfinger’s CTO. And that attitude guides their tech decisions. You can check out more of our Unite Copenhagen 2019 coverage right here.As a close-knit studio with a competitive attitude, Madfinger values its lean-and-mean size in order to go against giant competitors – bosses even – in the mobile realm. The previous entry in the series - Shadowgun Legends - went on to win Google Play’s “Most Beautiful Game 2019”. Shadowgun War Games is due to launch sometime in the winter for mobile devices, with the developer confirming it will release before the end of Q1 2020. The Czech firm confirmed that the studio reached 200 million downloads in August 2018, with this new figure showing the company’s huge growth in just over a year. Since Madfinger was formed in 2010, eight mobile titles have been launched such as its Unkilled, Monzo, Samurai Series and Shadowgun series and Dead Trigger series. The talk was focused on Shadowgun War Games and how the studio is ‘leading next-gen multiplayer mobile FPS games. The download number was revealed by Madfinger games lead programmer Vladimir Zadrazil during his session at Unite Copenhagen 2019. Brno-based studio Madfinger Games has accumulated 250 million games across its entire library of mobile titles.
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