BUILD | GAME ENGINES UNITY FOCUS Littleloud proves that Unity is perfect for more than just traditional games
THE THRILL ELECTRIC Developer: LittleLoud What is it? An ‘enhanced digital comic’ that has leapt from browser to iOS
www.thethrilleletric.com
UNITY IS OF COURSE a games engine, but every now and then it’s used for a project that pushes the boundaries of what a ‘game’ is, and what the technology can do. The Thrill Electric by studio Littleloud is a
Littleloud’s Darren Garrett (middle) and Iestyn Lloyd (above) chose Unity for The Thrill Electric as they felt it was able to handle its large and complex series of interactive comic book pages
perfect example of such a creation. Effectively a digital comic with a soft sociological commentary and educational leaning commissioned by UK broadcaster Channel 4, it is the creation of a collective from a range of disciplines. “The original idea was developed by Jonathan Davenport and Andy Mettam of Hat Trick Digital,” says Darren Garrett, Littleloud’s founder and creative director. “They had been developing the story with the writers, John Reppion and Leah Moore, and the artists, Windflower Studios. They knew it was going to be a digital comic, which is the point when we met up. With over 35 years of collective comics knowledge in the office, along with technical and storytelling expertise, this project fell squarely into our remit.” Setting out to better the existing ‘motion
comics’ – which in essence animate the traditional graphic narrative while respecting conventions of storyboarded fiction – Littleloud and its collaborators came upon the idea of having each comic panel divided up into separate planes to create a level of depth and movement. The reader, they decided, should be able to pan over those elements to get a subtle sense of immersion and direction in the game. Immediately as the team had zeroed in on
this core idea, it became apparent Unity was the ideal tool for the job.
62 | MAY 2012
POWER TOOLS “We’d previously used Unity for creating cross-platform content for Paramount and Marvel, so we were familiar with Unity,” explains Littleloud technical director Iestyn Lloyd. “Having spent some time on researching Unity’s capabilities for larger projects, we felt that it would be able to handle what we wanted to throw at it.” And the team had plenty to pitch at Unity. Namely 150 pages of multi-layered comic in 3D space, with almost 3,000 high quality textures, supported by a wealth of additional 3D animations, audio, and video.
File size on the web was a concern but
Unity’s built-in compression and streaming of scenes dealth with
this problem. Isetyn Lloyd, Littleloud
“We had to have a certain amount of faith in the engine of choice, as we weren’t aware that a similar project on this scale had been attempted on any engine,” continues Lloyd. “Fortunately we had first-hand experience of the excellent technical support the Unity team offers, so we knew that if we hit any major obstacles we’d be able to find a solution.” Of particular use to the Littleloud staff was
Unity’s ability to script the IDE. “I was able to write scripts and tools to automate a substantial part of the workflow,
saving hundreds of man-hours throughout the lifetime of the project,” says Llyod. “Other than that, being able to debug the comic at runtime using the IDE and changing values in real time was a huge time-saver.”
EXPENSIVE THRILLS Of course, making The Thrill Electric, which has just been released on iOS after receiving much acclaim as a browser title, wasn’t without challenge. With those 3,000 high quality textures and numerous other assets coming in at 10Gb in original file size, and the need to batch process huge amounts of that data inside Unity, Littleloud’s project was potentially hugely costly on memory supplies. “While file size on the web was a concern,
Unity’s built-in compression and streaming of scenes dealt with this problem perfectly,” states Llyod. “However, getting thousands of high quality textures onto mobile was a different story. It took some time to figure out where we could use different compression and optimisation techniques to make sure we could get a good experience on both iPhone and iPad.” Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of the
Unity support team, and the infamous quality of the engine’s profiler, The Thrill Electric has made it to iPhone and iPad; the latter being a platform Littleloud is convinced is a perfect place to build the foundations of the future of digital comics. Working together with their collaborators,
Unity and Littleloud have done much to strengthen the bridge that links the mechanics of comics and games, creating an opportunity many other devs may be keen to emulate.
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