The Naked Truth About Naked Sky Entertainment

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GWN: RoboBlitz uses Epic's Unreal Engine 3, which is perhaps the most widely promoted game engine of the current generation. Why did you decide to go with such expensive technology versus building your own? What advantages/challenges did the development team face using it? What other middleware did you use?

JG: Based on the features we wanted in the game and the look we were trying to achieve, licensing UE3 (Unreal Engine 3) proved to be the most cost effective option for us. Developing our own engine from scratch in our limited budget would have forced RoboBlitz to be less than a full game experience. We knew from the start that we wanted RoboBlitz to be a hardcore next-gen game and we wanted it out fast. We'd had experience with UE3 before and felt that with some tweaking, the engine could meet our needs, and it did. It took a lot of work to customize it for a fully physics driven game and to make it all fit under 50 MB, but it was definitely worth it. In addition to UE3, we used Allegorithmic's ProFX procedural texture software to generate our textures at load time.



GWN: One of the many impressive things about RoboBlitz for Xbox 360 is that the game code fits neatly into a 50 MB download, whereas the PC version has a considerably larger footprint. Describe for our readers how you pulled this off using procedural texturing, compression, and other gaming "magic." Was any content cut from the console version because of space other than the level editor?

JG: We definitely did not cut any game content from the PC version to fit the game on the console. The only things we left out were the Editor (which could not be used on the Xbox 360) and the Blitz Anthem theme song (which you can download for free from our website). We designed RoboBlitz to be under 50 MB on the Xbox 360 from the start, so that's the whole game in there on Live Arcade. There's just a lot of fancy stuff going on under the hood to make it run that small.    



The most "magical" effect is definitely the use of procedural textures. Using the ProFX system, our artists could design the textures as bitmaps, and then the guys at Allegorithmic helped us to generate a tiny set of instructions for each texture that the Xbox 360 could use at load time to recreate the bitmap. It's a bit like vector graphics vs. bitmap graphics, but with way more functionality.

Procedural textures didn't take care of all the shrinkage though - we threw in a few more tricks, like compressing our data very tightly and slowly, and taking advantage of the three cores on the Xbox 360 to decompress it asynchronously at acceptable speeds.

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