(Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN – On the left the 3D mesh in the modeling software and on the right as seen in the game)
Thousands of games are published every year, and users keep track of the videos, trailers, news and images that are published on YouTube, forums and social networks. Later, we dedicate hours and hours of our lives to squeeze them and enjoy the stories they tell us, but few people know how a game really begins, going from being an empty project that little by little takes shape to end with a product that it can give us hundreds or thousands of hours of fun. From here we want to illuminate that creation process a bit, because sometimes it can be just as interesting, or more, than the game itself.
Currently, all AAA games base their development on several parts: the graphic resources, the audio resources and the game engine on which the game itself is built.
The graphics
The graphics are the part that, surely, has a greater impact at first and that must be taken care of to the extreme, whether you want to get photorealistic graphics like those of Battlefield V or cell shading like those of Dragon Ball Fighterz, because some bad Graphics tend to lead to an almost automatic rejection by a large part of the general public.
Artists have dozens of tools to create the game’s models or textures, perhaps the most famous being Maya, 3DS Max, Zbrush and Photoshop . These programs not only model and animate the 3D meshes that will later be imported into the graphics engine, but also work on lighting using normal maps , texturing by applying images to the models and shaders , programs that modify the operation of the card. graphics or GPU through vertex and pixel shaders .
The animation of these meshes can be done by hand frame by frame, achieving spectacular results, but expensive for the time it takes. Other forms are the capture of movements, the recording of real actors in spaces with 3D cameras or by means of physics simulation.
(Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe in full motion capture session for the game Beyond Two Souls, developed by the Quantic Dream studio for Sony PlayStation)
The soundtrack also counts
For audio we find tools such as Wwise, Fabric or Spatial Workstation . Sounds and music may seem like the least important part of game development, but people like Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill) , Nobuo Uematsu (Final Fantasy) or Gustavo Santaolalla (Last of Us) would not entirely agree, as they are the creators of several of the most famous soundtracks.
Once the graphics and audio have been created, they are passed to the game engine, the piece in charge of making everything work, as if it were the conductor. Of those available for licensing by individuals and other video game studios, two are the stars and the most used today, Unreal Engine from Epic Games (the people of Fortnite) and Unity .
(Unreal 1 / Epic Games)
Unreal Engine was born in 1998 when EPIC developed the classic Unreal . In the days of 3DFX Voodoo and Glide , EPIC created a huge sci-fi FPS , with spectacular graphics for the time, and with the scale that the game acquired, it had no choice but to create a set of tools that would be the seed of what today is perhaps the most versatile engine. Once Unreal was finished, other classics such as Unreal Tournament or Unreal 2 were born from that engine, and it evolved little by little until it became a tool used by other studios throughout the world. The four versions that have come to light so far have given us games of the stature of BioShock, Deus Ex, Splinter Cell, Army of Two or Batman Arkham Asylum
(We recommend taking a look at the complete list of titles developed with the different versions of Unreal Engine )
(Blacksmith, an awesome demo made with Unity)
For its part, Unity was born as a game engine only for Mac platforms, but little by little it was expanding its base and reaching all kinds of devices. Currently it is the most used by indie developers and for mobile development. Among the games made with Unity we can find Overcooked, Hollow Knight, Gray, Cuphead or Yooka-Laylee (with Unity we also recommend seeing the list of games developed, since many of the indie gems have been created with it)
(Battlefield V / Electronic Arts – Dice)
Large studios such as EA, Ubisoft or AAA game development teams have created their own engines, with the same quality or more than Unreal Engine or Unity . Electronic Arts bought Dice in 2006, taking all of its technology with it: the Frostbyte engine. With this move EA managed to become independent from Epic Games and the Unreal Engine and focus all its developments on the Dice engine, being able to enjoy games like Battlefield IV, Battlefield V or Mass Effect thanks to it.
(Assassin`s Creed / UbiSoft)
Ubisoft made the decision with the first Assassin’s Creed to create its own technology. At first it was called Scimitar Engine and later called Anvil Engine , this engine is currently in its second version. Since its creation, all Ubi studios have used it and games like For Honor, Rainbow Six or Assassin’s Creed Odyssey have been created with it. Only one of Ubi’s studios works with another engine, and those are the folks at Massive Entertainment , creators of The Division . When they began the titanic project that was to create an online game with these characteristics (TPS mixed with RPG in an open online world) they decided to create their own technology from scratch, an engine that would be called Snow Drop.
(The Division / UbiSoft – Massive Entertainment)
These engines, in turn, are tools mounted on third-party APIs to be able to reproduce the audio, generate the graphics, receive input from controls or communicate over the Internet and create online games. The most famous APIs are DirectX , created by Microsoft to create all kinds of multimedia applications under Windows, and OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenAL , a graphical API created by the Khronos group , a union of different companies such as Epic, nVidia, Apple, Valve or AMD .
The processes that these engines use to represent games are very complex, but broadly speaking, they would be the following:
- The audio is decompressed in RAM if it is small (sounds of gunshots, explosions, surrounding noises …) so that the reproduction is fast and immediate. If they are music tracks, they are usually loaded in streaming from the disc, since the same speed is not needed as for other types of sounds.
- 3D models are rasterized from triangles to pixels using first vertex shaders and then pixel shaders . The former are concerned with transforming the vertices of the meshes from a 3D space to a 2D space such as that of a PC screen or a television for a console. The latter are in charge of applying color to each pixel transformed by the vertex shaders.
- Once all the resources are loaded, small programs called scripts are in charge of responding to all the events that create the logic of the game : the user interacts with the controller, data is received from other players in online games, the game’s AI makes enemies attack the player …
The second point, that of how the models are represented in the game, is the part that has changed the most during the last decades. Now we can use vertex and pixel shaders to create all kinds of graphic effects, something impossible just over a decade ago, when the graphics pipeline was preset. With this freedom, effects can be created for photorealistic graphics such as Subsurface Scattering , Parallax Mapping or, possibly one of the greatest advances in recent years, Physically based rendering or PBR , which through physical simulations makes, for example, the materials in a 3D model are capable of reacting to light.
(Battlefield V with Raytracing enabled)
In recent months, thanks to nVidia’s new RTX graphics, real-time ray tracing has been implemented within games, with Battlefield V being the first to do so. Ray tracing consists of tracing rays that simulate light to calculate the rebounds of these and to be able to represent refraction and reflection on the materials of a 3D scene.
One of the parts that has gained the most importance in recent years has been the online section. In order to offer us these games against other players, the games need to make use of servers that are in charge of sending the information between the different players in the game, these can be dedicated or p2p . The dedicated ones are servers that the developers themselves make available to users, with normally low latencies (which are not always, sometimes laggy games occur) and p2p ones , in which it is really the player’s team that creates the game. that acts as a server between all the players. The difference between the two is basically the price of maintaining them, dedicated ones cost companies a lot of money, although they offer much better performance than p2p ones , so the games that opt for this type are more applauded among users. .
This summary that we have made is a brief sketch of the very long process of creating an AAA , a task that usually lasts between 3 and 4 years and involves teams that usually go from 100 to 300 people , with extreme cases of 500 people in very titles. powerful.
