Literal realism was not a goal or reference point of success for Fracked.
IN TERMS OF VISUAL DESIGN, IS THERE A DIFFERENCE IN APPROACH WHEN WORKING ON A VR-ONLY TITLE COMPARED TO A NON-VR GAME? There are a lot of cross overs from traditional console development in terms of asset creation pipelines etc, but when it comes to motivations of art assets, the visual languages implied to the player, plus 360 degrees of world design and composition, there is a whole lot of difference in approach. The measurement of good, solid VR
Above: Leaning into rendering challenges and turning and tuning them into ownable stylistic traits.
and exploration through paddling/cover and climbing.
Both games strive for 1:1 agency within the world and accessible gunplay action. But tonally and rendering wise, yes, they are very contrasting titles. For Fracked, we avoided complex materials by leaning into vivid illustrative finishes where surface properties were impressionistically alluded to rather than rendered in passes. Phantom Covert Ops has the context of night, meaning we could spread out the material complexity and fidelity, focusing on key areas in light, but keeping the rendering passes low and simple in the darkness. Both projects look different yet employ a considered strategy in terms of material use and rendering for both style and performance considerations. Fracked’s world production / 3D pipeline became an exercise in impressionism and composition. It was a real creative challenge for even some of the most competent of 3D artists. The motivation was never realism, it was flow and legibility in a vivid and dangerous world. Anything that got in the way of that composition, flow or feeling was seriously scrutinised.
creative design can present shifts in workflow and process. Just reviewing in VR has its advantages and idiosyncrasies that can affect how you perceive your work, its scale, and the aesthetics. It’s easy to bring hangovers from traditional games dev into VR, but when you craft spaces for a new level of player agency, where legibility can trump fidelity, your measurements of success tend to shift and evolve.
WERE THERE ANY UNEXPECTED DIFFICULTIES? Well, Covid and all the proceeding lockdowns were probably the most unprecedented difficulty, ever! So yep – quite a big one. Fracked was mostly developed
throughout the pandemic and launched by an entirely hybrid dev team. Pivoting our entire development process to remote, overnight, whilst crafting a brand-new IP certainly mixed things up a bit. Lots of lessons learned, plenty of experimentation and iteration was lived, but in the long run it has certainly paid off. We are very proud of what Fracked has achieved and what it represents for us, as a slick, accessible and inherently fun, high quality PSVR action shooter. We emerged from Fracked with an evolved sense of process and wellbeing, with both hybrid and remote first dev teams and processes. We can say with
WHAT WERE THE ART TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES USED DURING DEVELOPMENT? High level, there’s four main areas I’d categorise: real-time engine, asset creation, dev tools, and practices and processes Engine: We have plenty of experience and heritage working with Unreal in
VR. It has always given us the versatility we need, and has proven malleable enough to support our “fail-fast” prototyping endeavours, whilst also delivering on our rendering demands and high production values. Asset Creation: We are a Maya / Motion Builder based studio, so most of the art team have input with our core tech teams to deliver on tools and tech to help innovation on production processes within each sub discipline. Plus, the other industry favourites such as Substance, Adobe Creative Suite, Z-Brush etc. Dev Tools: It’s hard not to call out hardware performance as a key aspect and KPI that is always prioritised and tracked throughout development. Mitigation strategies are always called out and reviewed early, often with new tools and technology rolled into each development, sometimes specific to each title. We’ve built up an array of libraries, often deployed across multiple devs that when combined can really help streamline both the teams’ pipelines and our rendering capabilities. Practices & Processes: Full animation performance planning, capturing, and processing to open collaborative, cross discipline critiquing, are all key tools and processes we take seriously, with various tools in place to help make this happen. This is a very exciting and evolving area within our current live devs and their hybrid team structures, constantly iterating and improving on this front.
March 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 63
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