Interview with the creators of Undead Carnage: Redemption for Windows Phone

    I present to you an interview with the creators of the game Undead Carnage: Redemption for Windows Phone - Artyom Veselovsky. Interviewed sashaeve .

    [Alexander] Hello, Artem. Tell us a little about yourself, your team, and how the idea of ​​creating the Undead Carnage game was born.

    [Artem] Hello! My name is Artyom Veselovsky, I'm 25. Our team consists of three people: designer Sasha Synyava, programmer and level designer Orest Blagodar, well, I am responsible for the development of the engine core and 3D animation. Game development takes place in your free time. For some of us, this is a dream since school, someone started to dream about it later, but we all first became gamers :) Everyone from the team has preferences in games about the same - we love action and football.

    From the moment we gathered in a separate team, we wanted to make an active game for smartphones. There were many trials ... There were many ideas (and still have), many projects started, many things in the style of proof of concept.


    The idea was born at the beginning of last summer. Then I had the first working build of the game on the phone. We used HTC HD2 for testing. Frankly speaking, she was crooked, ugly and boring. Particularly boring ... The game was called 2D Zombie Action. Many times reworked parts of the engine, balanced dynamics, but she always lacked a design approach. We dreamed about a 3D game and stopped developing ...

    They did 3D shooters, learned a lot about programming 3D graphics, wrote their own 3D engine, wrote demo games on the theme of tank battles. They added artificial intelligence there and rested on the phone's performance.

    Then, somehow, they saw the announcement of a Windows Phone development contest from Microsoft Ukraine and Nokia, where games were one of the categories. We decided to take part. There was little time, nothing to do from scratch. And they remembered that we had an almost working game, tools, and an idea came up. They sat down, thought about it, put on a mock story, shared responsibilities and set to work.

    At first, all three were programmed, but the lack of design was very striking and did not overlap with any tricks in the gameplay. And then Sanya came on the scene. With Visual Studio, he switched completely to Photoshop. And after the first developments, the game gained a cool design and atmosphere. We looked at what we did, and now, our first game is Undead Carnage: Redemption.

    [Alexander] Why Redemption?

    [Artem] Redemption means redemption. The history of the game tells the story of a guy who lost a loved one a few years before the events in the game, but does not say anything that happened during these several years. And the story is written in such a way that the sequel suggests itself. Atonement for sins in the past. Part tells the game itself. The part about the “past” may be discussed later. In general, play :)

    [Alexander] How much time and resources did it take to create?

    [Artem] 3 people were constantly developing. It took a lot of time. Hastened to make a working version for the contest. So we had a demo version of the game. They showed the beginning of the story and the not-so-ready game design. In absolute terms, it took about 5 months to the game itself and about a month to develop the engine and tools.

    [Alexander] Tell us about the technical aspects of the game?

    [Artyom]From the very beginning, a very strong emphasis was placed on technology. Squeezed the maximum out of iron (then it was only the first generation of devices running Windows Phone 7). They did maximum beauty. Of the main aspects - this, of course, tuned and balanced parallax scrolling. Its idea is to draw several layers of graphics with different scales and scroll speeds. If this is properly set up and the design is correct, then a simple 2D game creates an illusion of the depth and perspective of a 3D game. Also in our game, the Bloom effect is implemented, most likely the only implementation for today under Windows Phone 7. The idea of ​​bloom is to create a light defraction effect. If the character is dark in color against a light background, then his outlines are also highlighted and blurred with the background. Later added the effects of curving space and Slow Motion. In fact, it turned out to be a fairly complicated drawing pipeline. We draw the whole scene into a picture, spread it and light it in the right places. Then we use this picture as a texture for the polygonal mesh, which we can bend, thereby creating a curvature that gives, say, a glass ball. Later added the ability to set fire to opponents. The fireball, which we showed in the demo, now does a lot of damage due to ignition. It’s beautiful to watch how a burning and charred zombie goes towards the main character :) which we showed in the demo now does a lot of damage due to arson. It’s beautiful to watch how a burning and charred zombie goes towards the main character :) which we showed in the demo now does a lot of damage due to arson. It’s beautiful to watch how a burning and charred zombie goes towards the main character :)

    [Alexander] And who writes music to you?

    [Artem] Themselves ... Guitar parts were recorded (played by Maxim Synyava - Sasha's younger brother, and Andrei Lutsuk - our employee and friend). Then Sasha processed this whole thing on a computer. Some tracks were not recorded at all. That is, this is an electronic creation in its purest form.

    [Alexander] What were the biggest technical problems when creating the game?

    [Artyom]The first difficulty is the limited SDK and platform. The phone does not support programmable shaders. Much smaller size can use buffers (reach vs hi-def profiles for XNA). This greatly limits the ability of programmers. A strange step by Microsoft, but I, in principle, guess what the problem is. The problem lies in the incompatibility of the phone’s hardware and XNA 4.0. The XNA framework itself is just a wrapper around DirectX 9.0 interfaces. And Windows Phone devices are built on a GPU with Shader Model 4.0 (DirectX 10). Although the guys from Microsoft saved the situation a bit by writing their shader move in five built-in effects, this is not enough in most cases. For things like Windows Phone, you need to create an SDK from scratch. Here I will give a low bow to Sony for the PS Suite SDK. Everything has been done there for five plus. C # language, high-level framework working on Mono, NVidia CG as a shader language, the ability to use unsafe code. There is even no Sprite Batch. Everything you need to write yourself, everything is hardcore, everything is beautiful.

    The second difficulty, and at the same time the benefit is the inability to target the code to a specific hardware. That is, things that work fine on second-generation phones in 90% of cases will greatly slow down on the first. We have to cut off the beauty, which is unfortunate. But at the moment, there are a lot of first-generation devices, so you can’t discount them.

    The third problem - in Ukraine there is no marketplace for developers. And it's not even about publishing the program in the Windows Phone Marketplace on your own, but about the fact that on AppHub there are things available only for registered developers. This makes learning difficult.

    The fourth problem is the disinterest of Microsoft itself. Here I am talking about Xbox Live. We wrote to Microsoft about Xbox Live for Undead Carnage. We just wanted an agreement to use the opportunities for social gaming: achievements, leaderboards on MS servers. We were told that they would contact if interested. We didn’t get in touch ... Let's think something with Facebook (Alawar and Nokia also did not give an affirmative answer - Alexander) .

    Well and the most important thing is a constant striving for the ideal. But it is impossible to achieve it, the game still cannot be liked by absolutely all users. Well, a constant balance between the right things and new cool ideas that do not really fit the right things. Because of this, I had to rewrite the main modules of the game engine several times. But this is an experience, anyway.

    [Alexander] Undead Carnage took part in three contests from Microsoft, but was able to win only one. And this at a time when she was a leader in the Russian and American Marketplace. What do you think is the reason?

    [Artyom] We think this is due to several things. The main aspect - the game has its own target audience and its age rating. As it turned out, not everyone evaluates a product by its qualities, regardless of ratings and topics. That is, if the game is made well, it looks beautiful, sounds and provides hardcore gameplay, then why draw a line between daisies and zombies? Perhaps the game is too complicated for mobile devices ... But still, this is the Xbox mobile platform, which means that the games should be similar to the platform.

    [Alexander] Demo version downloaded a total of more than 120k times. Do you think this is a good result?

    [Artem] I think (and the whole team will agree with me) that this is an excellent result as for a “pen test”. Still, this is our first game, brought to the end. For an inexperienced team, not funded by anyone, who developed the game in 99% of cases at home at night, sometimes stayed at the company at night and did the game on laptops, this is an excellent result.

    [Alexander] There is a lot of talk about the future of Windows Phone. What do you think are the prospects for Windows Phone 7 here and in the world?

    [Artyom]Again, I will speak on behalf of the whole team. We believe that the platform will flourish. The most important problem is always in people. They are afraid of something new. Afraid to try. Discard new with the slightest minus and give no chance. Many do not like Windows Phone at first sight. And I had the same acquaintance with her. Fortunately, I did not buy the device. I had HTC HD2 with Windows Mobile, then I installed Android on it, then WP7. I did not understand, did not recognize, demolished, returned Android. But appreciated its smoothness and stability. A few days later, he demolished Android and returned WP7. It was in the winter of 2010-2011. And she’s still there :) And the guys liked her.

    Today, we have more than 10 WP7 devices in the company that I know of. Every new user just falls in love with WP7. It’s nice to look at a person yesterday with an Android phone that speaks well of WP7. We also believe that WP8 will be a new round of development and a continuation of the ideas laid down in WP7. I would also like to believe that Microsoft will begin to appreciate not only large developers, but also small ones. There are many examples of this. Even with games. Even on WP7. Games from big and famous developers are far from always better, but very often worse than indie projects. If indie developers are given the opportunity, there will be a much better ecosystem, and the platform will develop better.

    In Ukraine, this is a bit more complicated. Again, this is the Marketplace, it is a normal mobile Internet and our greed. Many do not understand how you can pay for software ...

    [Alexander] Well, the last question, what are your plans for the future?

    [Artem] We will make games :) What exactly? Time will tell. I can only say that we will try to set the bar for games on WP7.

    I personally really want to finish and release Demon Smasher, a 3D game that Sasha and I wrote in less than a day on a hackathon in Lviv (the hackathon was conducted by the wp7rocks - Alexander team) . There are a lot of ideas, all are interesting. A lot of developments, a lot of code has been written and is waiting for its turn to work on users' phones.

    Undead Carnage has taught us a lot. Now we will know where problems may appear during development, how to solve them, or even not get into them. There was also a desire to port Undead Carnage: Redemption for tablets with Windows 8. Time will tell!

    Also popular now: