Unity aide Madfinger à privilégier l'expérience des joueurs sur mobile dans Shadowgun War Games

Studio très soudé à l'esprit compétitif, Madfinger compte sur l'efficacité optimale que lui permet sa petite structure pour s'attaquer à des concurrents de taille, et même aux géants de l'univers du mobile. Cet état d'esprit le guide dans ses décisions en matière de technologie. 

« Nous ne pouvons tout simplement pas nous permettre d'avoir 10 personnes qui travaillent sur un moteur, et 10 autres sur d'autres outils internes. Nous devons dédier notre énergie à la conception de nos jeux et de nos magnifiques visuels, car c'est notre point fort », affirme Miroslav Ondrus, directeur technique chez Madfinger.

« Il y a une vingtaine d'années, quand je me suis lancé dans le développement de jeux vidéo, il n'y avait pas beaucoup de moteurs tiers, alors mes amis et moi avons dû concevoir et entretenir le nôtre. Mais aujourd'hui, Unity est un outil complet, porté par plus de 1000 ingénieurs, ce qui nous permet de nous concentrer sur le développement de nos jeux, sans perdre de temps à la conception et à la maintenance d'un moteur. »

Luciano Alibrandi, directeur des opérations et directeur marketing intérimaire de Madfinger, approuve : « Il y a dix ans, nous nous sommes rencontrés au bon moment, alors que Unity et Madfinger étaient en pleine évolution. Nos compétences respectives se complétaient parfaitement et le timing était idéal. Nous avons ainsi construit ensemble pour nous concentrer sur ce que nous faisons de mieux : créer des jeux inédits. »

So, once a new title gets greenlit, how does Madfinger begin fleshing out its latest game ideas? 

“We like ProBuilder a lot – it’s a powerful tool for prototyping new levels and assets within Unity. We use it to build our scenes quickly and iterate on them across teams. We also like to use it for grey-boxing all the levels. This is handy because we can do all our work in Unity and don’t have to use another third-party software tool.” 

Ondrus also likes Unity’s Animation editor, especially the updated version of Key manipulation in Curves mode. His animators build their work in Autodesk’s MotionBuilder, and once they import their clips they can select and manipulate several keys at once to, for example, scale curves horizontally (to change the time placement) or vertically (to change the value). It’s a small feature but it really speeds up their workflow.

Another feature they like a lot is baked lighting mode, which provides two important benefits according to Ondrus, “It lets us create great atmosphere in our games without any cost to performance.”

Ever mindful of how high-fidelity graphics run on player devices, Ondrus says, “We’re hyper-aware of the battery cost on mobile, so consequently we heavily optimize performance. To do that we use Unity tools, including the Profiler, which helps us look for unnecessary allocations and render calls, and to optimize our code in general.” They also tap the Frame Debugger and Occlusion Culling to ensure the builds are tight and the game lands just right on whatever device you’re playing on. 

Ondrus mentions one other popular Unity feature. “For me, Unity’s multiplatform capabilities simplify things quite a bit. We can build an entire game on one code base and not have to worry about which mobile device it’s going to run on. With Unity, it’s really easy – it’s just a switch in the settings and the runtime version is output for the target platform.” 

How and where a studio hosts its new game is a perennial question, with options available right across the spectrum, from 100% bare metal servers to fully in the cloud. Each of these options has technical and financial advantages as well as drawbacks. With an eye to the future, Madfinger decided early that for a competitive first-person shooter (FPS) like Shadowgun War Games, peer-to-peer (P2P) wasn’t going to cut it. They needed dedicated servers to guarantee a smooth, lag-free experience. 

For Vladimir Zadrazil (“Zadr”), Madfinger’s lead programmer, it was a simple choice. “Our ambition with War Games is to deliver a fun yet highly competitive experience, so lag, cheating, and long queues are unacceptable. Thankfully, with Multiplay’s multi-cloud, scalable solution we’re able to give our players a consistent experience, regardless of device or location. The only thing we can’t promise is that you’ll win!”

With Madfinger’s ambition to make the new game an eSports favorite, dedicated servers were a must, as they can prevent one player from gaining an unfair advantage over an opponent. “With P2P there’s more risk of cheating due to one device being the host. With dedicated servers we can put anti-cheat measures in place and, if necessary, take down a server with ease. It gives us more control,” says Zadr.

As any studio will tell you, new game launches are always fraught with unknowns, such as approximately how many players will join and from where. However, when Shadowgun War Games went live, server scaling went smoothly. “Thanks to Multiplay, there was never an issue of running out of server capacity. As word got out and players started to download and play the game en masse, we were able to scale with ease. This meant no players were left waiting for a game, which is so important for us,” says Ondrus.

According to Zadr, latency is one of the top issues that determine good or bad gameplay experience. “That’s why we decided to collaborate with Multiplay on networking. And it’s a win-win strategy because they helped us focus on making games, while we gave them feedback on their tech, so they can make the product better for everyone, not just for us.”

Ondrus also calls out Unity’s support as a key to their comfort level, “The communication is super fast and super smooth. For example, I recently asked a question in our Slack channel and someone in San Francisco replied and helped me, which was amazing because he was many time zones away! We have excellent cooperation from Unity.”

Dans les jeux multijoueurs, il est crucial que le matchmaking soit rapide et efficace pour que l'expérience de jeu soit plaisante. « Nous souhaitons garantir la meilleure expérience possible aux joueurs, et cela commence avec les adversaires qu'ils rencontrent. Nous voulons nous assurer que les joueurs accèdent au jeu rapidement et qu'ils jouent avec des personnes de leur niveau. Sinon, ils vont se contenter de quitter l'application et ne jamais rejouer », explique Zadr.

M. Ondrus confie que pendant le développement de Shadowgun War Games, l'équipe concevait un système de matchmaking. « C'était avant que l'on apprenne que Unity créait son propre service de matchmaking flexible, alors nous n'avions pas de produit tiers en tête. Mais dès que nous l'avons su, nous avons sauté sur l'occasion. Nous n'avons eu qu'à configurer nos propres fonctions, ce qui était très simple. » 

Avant que le joueur rejoigne une partie, le client de jeu (par exemple, le téléphone du joueur) évalue la qualité de la connexion aux centres de données mondiaux de Multiplay avec Quality of Service (QoS). Les données QoS sont soumises au matchmaking avec les paramètres de partie et les statistiques du joueur collectées par le service de Madfinger pendant l'attente, le serveur faisant autorité, dans le but d'empêcher la triche. Le système de matchmaking exécute les fonctions personnalisées de Madfinger pour trouver des parties compétitives avec une connexion rapide. Ça ne prend que quelques secondes.

Le service de matchmaking de Multiplay est pleinement intégré à son outil de redimensionnement multicloud, ce qui signifie que les joueurs sont non seulement placés dans les parties appropriées, mais aussi sur le bon serveur.

For today’s multiplayer games, live communication during campaigns and battles is key to outcomes. Voice comms are one of the most important factors to player experience because they let players get more organized by discussing what they want to do and how to do it, adding a lot to their experience. 

Madfinger first integrated Vivox into Shadowgun Legends, and it was a simple process. They spent just two days with Unity’s Vivox SDK, which is the expected implementation time. “We ran into a few small issues on our side but in general it was a super easy, painless process,” says Ondrus. Now Vivox hosts and manages all the voice comms for the game, and Madfinger is planning to integrate it into Shadowgun War Games very soon.

This means the Madfinger team can speed up their development process and focus on player engagement. “Having the Vivox team available 24/7 is a blessing. Rather than stressing over an outage in one region or some bug or another, we can speak to the Vivox guys and it gets fixed,” added Ondrus.

To round out their in-game comms strategy, players can also communicate with emojis, and Madfinger is planning to implement text messaging soon.

“We’re really excited about the launch of Shadowgun War Games, as we believe this game will work across the board, from solo players to the most competitive team gamers,” says Ondrus. “And as our player base grows, we’ll definitely start thinking about eSports,” which is not surprising to learn. After all, this ambitious studio has always punched well above its weight in the mobile-gaming arena.

Watch Madfinger’s presentation at Unite Copenhagen to get the behind-the-scenes scoop on how they’re using Multiplay and Vivox for game hosting, matchmaking, and voice comms.