Asynchronous action-RTS RAD Soldiers (main images), and Splash Damage CCO and co-founder Richard Jolly
ASYNCHRONOUS GAMING as a concept is not especially new, but of late the multiplayer model has entered a new era of acceptance. OMGpop’s sensationally popular picture sharing title Draw Something can take much of the credit for cementing the fundamentals of the asynchronous concept in consumers’ minds, yet it is but one of many recent releases to highlight the potential of turn- based mobile gaming. And now a new contender is ready to
tempt the game playing public with asynchronous action; namely the Splash Damage and WarChest-developed turn-based strategy shooter RAD Soldiers. And WarChest – part of the family of games companies that also includes parent studio Splash Damage and online services provider Fireteam – has opted to adopt Unity as its engine of choice for RAD Soldiers. “RAD Soldiers is our first outing on mobile, so it was really important to us to be able to hit the ground running,” confirms Splash Damage CCO and co-founder Richard Jolly. “We evaluated a number of different engines, both on feature sets and cost, deciding that Unity outperformed them in pretty much every regard. Testament to this is that we were able to pull a game prototype together for RAD Soldiers in the space of a week and have it running on an iPhone.”
FAST WORK Already Jolly has touched on one of Unity’s most famous strengths – its knack for rapid prototyping. However, the ability to quickly generate working models was not the engine’s only feature that proved essential to RAD Soldier’s creation.
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“The Profiler was great for helping us track
down performance issues, and it allowed us to get RAD Soldiers running as efficiently as possible on lower spec hardware,” explains Gordan Biggans, lead core tech programmer at Splash Damage. “It has also helped us look at memory issues, letting us know exactly how it was being used and enabling us to optimise RAD Soldiers’ download size – a key element of mobile games development.”
We evaluated a number of different
engines, deciding that Unity outperformed them in pretty much every regard. Richard Jolly, Splash Damage
Elsewhere, Unity’s scripting system proved equally popular with the WarChest and Splash Damage staff looking for a sleek, efficient way to code the game. “Using Mono Develop as the heart of Unity has made it really easy to get things done quickly, particularly for prototyping ideas,” Biggins confirms. “C# is something we’ve been looking forward to using for a long time. It’s so much cleaner, elegant and easy to use.”
A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING Of course, as with any game’s development, there were challenges for the RAD Soldiers team to overcome, especially considering how many firsts the team had to tackle.
The title is Splash Damage’s debut outside
the first-person shooter genre, and in being a turn-based asynchronous free-to-play smartphone game, embraces many concepts from numerous new realms of games design. Of all those elements, the multiplayer
system was perhaps the most complex to implement, and demanded the creation of a robust backend that could support a multitude of simultaneous games. “In the past, Splash Damage has always
outsourced this critical component to third-party companies,” explains Jolly. “Rather than reinventing the wheel every time, we decided to create a new company called Fireteam to build a suite of tools for us that we’d then be able to re-use and improve. RAD Soldiers is the first game to use Fireteam’s multiplayer suite and it’s almost laying the groundwork for future Splash Damage titles in that area. “Being able to operate the games we
create is a first for us and we’re very excited about the possibilities this offers.” Fortunately for Jolly and his team, Unity
proved the ideal solution for all the challenges RAD Soldiers threw at its creators, and the result is a visually bold game with ambitions of matching the previous poster children of asynchronous entertainment. But wrapping RAD Soldiers doesn’t seem to be the end of Splash Damage and WarChest’s time with Unity, as Jolly reveals. “We’re really looking forward to Unity 4.0 and beyond,” he says. “Two things stand out: the new animation tree system will allow us to have smoother animation transitions, and our UI guys can’t wait to get their hands on the new User Interface system.”