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My team and I have been developing some pretty cool tech with our current project I thought you might find interesting. It's an asset production pipeline aimed at giving small, low budget teams the capability to produce high volumes of quality assets so that they can compete with the production capability of large, high budget teams.
To give some context, we are developing a 2D collectible card strategy game that will have over 400 playable cards and 250 animated characters. The art budget for our game might run $3 million or more to develop, but we need to do it on a budget under $50K.
To accomplish this, we're leveraging a combination of free open source technology and visual templates to create art that is both low budget to produce and has a visual style that can compete with the budget of large teams.
In addition, our pipeline has several key technical benefits:
- Because we use vector graphics, the game can scale to any display size, so it will look razor sharp whether you play on a 4" phone or a 70" TV.
- Our texture atlas is created dynamically, so there is virtually no filesize footprint (our unpackaked install size is under 47MB
- Assets can be scaled to ensure they fit on a single atlas. This means we can render at 60FPS on a single draw call and support mobile devices as old as 5 years back.
- All of our assets and game logic can be delivered OTA within the provisions of iOS in DLC packages < 2MB without the need for client updates.
Here's a video that explains our pipeline in more detail and includes a walk through of how we are using it to develop assets:
Please let us know if you find this information useful. We'd love to further develop this once the game is finished and provide it as an open source resource for other developers to use.
