Tempo, Chaos und Karambolagen

When you create, they say you should start with what you know and love, and that is exactly what Destruction Crew did.

“We’ve always loved those super-fun, high-speed, derby destruction games, and we just really wanted to make our own game, give it our own twist, and see what we could do with it,” says Steven Derks, lead programmer and co-founder at Destruction Crew. “What can I say, we love to destroy stuff.”

Given the dynamic nature of their game, it seemed obvious to the Destruction Crew that playing online against others was something players would want to do.

“It’s really fun to play against bots, to play against Artificial Intelligence, but it’s much more fun to play against real players,” Derks says. “When you actually smash someone’s car in real-time, you’re like, ‘yeah, that’s it.’ And Unity Multiplayer made it easy for us to create that rich experience.”

However, issues such as network physics, concurrent user limits, and the need for a monetization plan presented challenges for a team of three with limited resources. Unity offered a number of features that helped them overcome these challenges.

Network physics make it a great user-experience

One thing that made it possible for Destruction Crew to offer a good online multiplayer experience was network physics via Unity’s API. This made it easy for them to simulate physics, so the experience was close enough alike on all clients to make it feel right.

Rather than using Unity's default, they built a custom NetworkTransform, which took about a month to design, code and test.

“Thanks to Unity's network serialization, we were able to easily transmit all the physics data required to simulate physics across all clients,” Derks says. “Through the very simple implementation of the Network API, you can implement network physics, no problem, and that was really important for our multiplayer mobile car game.”

Another multiplayer feature that Destruction Crew really appreciated was the ability to create private rooms.

“With Unity, you just set a password and you’re done, basically. When friends want to play together, they can just make a private room, password protect it if they want to, and they’re good to go,” says Derks.

Keeping up with their own success

Prior to release, Destruction Crew had hoped that players would embrace the multiplayer version, but they were nevertheless taken by surprise by the degree of popularity.

“In the beginning, we had 200 concurrent users (CCU), and we thought that should be enough, so just to be sure, we raised our CCU cap to 1000. But funnily enough, within a week, we were up to 5000 users. That was way more than our cap, but the Unity team always made it really easy for us to raise the bar. With the flexibility of the backend, we can go to 5000 CCU, no problem,” Derks says.

Spieler, die Stockcar-Rennen lieben, lieben normalerweise auch Autos. Dementsprechend war es wichtig, eine große Auswahl an coolen Fahrzeugen zu bieten. Für ein kleines Team wie Destruction Crew wäre es jedoch sehr zeitaufwändig gewesen, all diese Autos komplett selbst zu erstellen.

„Wir wollten den Spielern eine große Auswahl an Autos bieten, aber sie alle selbst zu erstellen, wäre für uns einfach zu viel gewesen“, sagt Nick Timmer, Game-Designer und Mitbegründer von Destruction Crew.

Die Lösung war, Auto-Pakete im Unity Asset Store zu kaufen und dann die UV-Mapping-Textur zu verändern, die Autos also mit eigenen Texturen und Skins an den gewünschten Stil anzupassen.

„Der Asset Store war superwichtig; ich will mir gar nicht vorstellen, wie es gewesen wäre, alle Autos von Grund auf selbst zu erstellen. Wir hätten Monate statt Wochen gebraucht“, sagt Timmer.

Because the cars are such an important part of the game, Destruction Crew decided to make it possible for players to customize them with new bumpers or wheels, for example. They then took it one step further and made this part of the game part of their monetization plan, too.

“Normally, players can only personalize their car if they have reached a certain level in the game. But we thought it would be a good idea to introduce what we call the black market, where players who haven’t reached that level can buy customization parts as an In-App Purchase (IAP).”

At first, Destruction Crew experienced some issues making IAPs work smoothly, which slowed them down, but as soon as they implemented Unity IAP, everything changed for the better.

“Previously we used other plugins, but they were difficult to use. It was always a little bit of a hassle. We would import per platform, but there were all kinds of problems. Unity IAP just makes it really easy. You just import it, hook up some functions, and you’re basically done. That’s it,” says Derks.

Destruction Crew have used the Unity Multiplayer solution from its first beta version. Although the early versions naturally were missing features here and there, they didn’t experience this as a problem as they developed their game because of the frequent updates that came with Unity Pro.

“Whenever we were missing a given feature, almost literally the next day, there would be an update of Unity that included it,” Derks says.

Features aside, the team still of course ran into some issues when they were building their game. In such cases, however, they invariably found help within the Unity community.

“The Unity community really helps us with fixing problems. And they were always really helpful. We always looked into Stack Overflow and the Unity Forums, and 9 out of 10 times we found a solution.”

Demolition Derby Multiplayer wurde zunächst für iOS, Android und Win Store Apps veröffentlicht. Destruction Crew konnte dabei feststellen, dass die Anpassung an die jeweilige Plattform ausgesprochen einfach ist.

„Wir mussten nur ein paar Einstellungen ändern, vielleicht Textur- oder Mesh-Compression-Einstellungen, aber eigentlich konnte es überall sofort losgehen.“

Mit dem verstärkten Aufkommen von VR auf dem Markt schien sich eine andere großartige Plattform für ihr Spiel zu ergeben. Und in ihrem Fall war es ganz einfach, eine VR-Version zu erstellen.

„Bis dahin hatten wir nur mobile Spiele erstellt, aber das Tolle an Unity ist, dass jede neue Technologie schnell unterstützt wird. Um eine VR-Version unseres Spiels zu erstellen, mussten wir also nur ein paar Plugins hinzufügen und es konnte losgehen“, sagt Timmer.