in Prague, dripping with so much Vampiric style that it’s basically begging to be put into a game. “We have millions of statues, it feels like,” says Rashidi.
“Prague is such a good city for this, there’s so much art in the architecture and the statues everywhere. So we’ve scanned quite a lot of different statues, and this is one of these high resolution meshes. It has millions of polygons, it’s way too much to be able to render in game. And there’s a lot of problems that occur with 3D scanned assets, they require quite a lot of cleanup. “So we need a process, and previously, this process has
been manual, where it takes a few days to go through all the different steps that are needed for an asset to get to a game-ready quality.” Thanks to Sharkmob’s tech, and its use of Houdini
however, this workload has now become considerably more manageable. “It takes the high resolution mesh, and then produces
one that’s much more much better fitted for the game,” says Rashidi. “The amount of triangles that we can render in the game, at any specific frame, has to be within our budget. It goes through and analyses the mesh, and gives artists some control over the detail of it. And then it automatically creates UVs for this mesh. “Previously, this process could take a couple
of days to go through. A process like this takes a few minutes, because it’s all in Houdini, it’s all a procedural system that we’ve built up. It takes down the time so significantly. I was sitting with one of our photogrammetry artists, and I apologised because it was taking a few minutes to generate something. They said ‘Why are you apologising? This used to take me days to get to this result!’ It’s very satisfying to work on a system that’s such a benefit for the artists, and we can get stuff into the game very quickly.”
STANDING OUT This procedural approach has helped Bloodhunt to stand out from the crowd in the battle royale space. It’s hardly an underfed genre, with some of the biggest names in gaming taking the top spots, and arguably much of the oxygen. Being able to fight it out across rooftops in a real-life city is a certainly compelling selling point in a genre populated by mostly flat, somewhat generic- looking islands. “When we started, most battle royales of this size were
usually an island with a flat terrain, and you have some trees and houses here and there,” says Cortes. “Just the fact that we wanted to make a game like this with a very detailed city was a little bit crazy. But this is what we wanted, to have a different type of playground, to be able to navigate wherever. All the rooftops, all the buildings,
50 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022
everything is climbable and explorable. We put a lot on Danial and the tech art team, it’s very, very difficult to pull off. With the streaming, the moving around… just the sheer amount of content and data, compared to something that’s more like an island with flatter terrain, or a desert city.” It’s not just the tech, of course. The team behind
Bloodhunt have a wealth of triple-A experience, which they seem well placed to bring to the battle royale space. “Most of the team come from triple-A production,”
says Cortes. “We wanted to take all the triple-A learnings that we have and bring it to the free-to-play space. Of course, it’s been quite a while since we started this production, and there’s been games pushing this boundary. But even now we are probably on the higher end of the scale when it comes to graphics, fidelity, animations, physics… Everything in general is at a very high level, something you’d normally see in a triple-A game that you pay a lot of money for, whereas you can just play Bloodhunt for free, just download and play it. “But there are a lot of requirements to be able to
create
this.That’s why we invested heavily in tech art early on, to try to find solutions for all of these things like photogrammetry procedural techniques, to have a relatively small team create something that’s very detailed and vast.”
FOCUS ON THE FUN Sharkmob are clearly big believers in this tech, and in finding a solution to game development that isn’t just throwing more people at the problem. As games continue to become more complicated and expensive to develop, the technology behind them needs to keep up. It’s not a matter of replacing developers, it’s about making their lives easier. “I think procedural content creation is such a
huge part of the future,” says Rashidi. “That’s why we’re investing so heavily in Houdini. I think a lot of people, even here at the studio, were a bit afraid of the procedural approach. I don’t want to replace an artist or replace their expertise, I just want to remove all of the boring time consuming work in between the creative, fun parts. “So we’ve started up a procedural content generation
group here at Sharkmob. We focus, mainly with Houdini, on helping pretty much anyone at the company involved with creating or marketing the game, in order to help them create content in a better, more efficient way where we utilise their talents, their creativity, and their artistic eye or their design perspective. We just remove so much of the annoying in between. The statues are a good example, instead of producing one statue every two or
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