Postmortem X-Mercs

Today, a turn-based tactical strategy X-Mercs from Game Insight has appeared on the virtual shelves of the App Store. Oleg Pridyuk, an industrial evangelist of the Lithuanian company, told about the history of the project at the Unite Europe 2015 conference. We offer a brief retelling of his report.

Content

One of the tasks that Game Insight set for themselves when developing X-Mercs was to create the largest three-dimensional hardcore strategic title on mobile devices.

For this reason, the installation was immediately taken to create a large amount of game content that would be difficult for even the most active players to “eat”. For the release, the team immediately prepared a giant campaign for 250 locations, 25 types of weapons (plus the same number of guns for PvP mode), and 50 unique opponents. And this is just a “starter kit”: the game was created with the expectation of constant updates.

For comparison, in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the number of game cards is less – 64 pieces.

To understand the scale of the work done, it is also important to remember: X-Mercs is a three-dimensional project in which players can rotate the camera in battles, zoom in and out of levels.

Plus, from the very beginning, the team wanted to introduce cinematic scenes a la XCOM: Enemy Unknown into the game, when, for example, a sniper makes a well-aimed shot and the camera takes him at that moment in close-up.

To make it look good, it took the creation of characters numbering about 3,500 polygons each, with 30-40 bones, textures of 1024 x 1024 pixels for the entire model and 512×512 for the face. Plus, about 260 animations were made only for fighters (130 for male characters, the same number for female characters).

It is clear that such an approach can hardly be called traditional for mobile games.

“The ambitions of developers raise the bar for the quality and size of strategic games on mobile devices. To date, there are very few mobile 3D games with similar quality and variety of content due to the cost of development. X-Mercs was made for more than 18 months, which is close to the record time for mobile titles,” said Pridyuk.

However, it took so much time to develop not because of the large amount of content, the production of which, by the way, is not going to stop.

“Even today, if you go into the art department and ask, hey, guys and girls, what are you doing, they will answer: we are making content. The 3D model needs to be modeled, skinned, reanimated, textured (and also bumps, speculators, shadows, shake separately for each platform), imported into the engine, then into the game,” Oleg added.

Engine

The development of the game at the initial stage (and it was back in the days of Unity 3.5) it was slowed down by the fact that the team at that time was not yet sure of the correctness of the choice of the engine. The project was made with the expectation of being a really large, massive product. Will Unity cope with it, is it not better to switch to a competitive solution or even write your own engine from scratch – similar questions have repeatedly arisen among developers.

For this reason, many things were written in the game so that in the event of a change of environment, ideally, they would not need to be rewritten at all.

But that wasn’t the only problem.

“At a late stage of the game’s development, there was a requirement for 64-bit runtime for all applications in the Apple Store. We had to move the game to a new version of the Unity engine and spend a lot of time adapting the entire accumulated code base to new requirements,” Oleg said.

According to him, the Game Insight and Unity teams were literally sitting together deciding how to launch a game based on IL2CPP.

Tools

Problems with the engine were compensated by the right management decisions, such as building a coherent production chain, which, however, was also not so easy. Switching to work only within the Mercurial and Unity Editor version control system required not only writing their own toolkits for each of the packages, but also serious efforts on the part of artists to master them. In general, maintaining a team consisting, of course, of creative people resulted in the need for constant support and strict control of the existing pipeline.

But it was very important that all team members saw their contribution to the project within a single environment, so that they could tweak the project independently, polish the game to perfection. If usually developers working on Unity create a project, almost without affecting each other’s assets, as long as they are not brought together by designers, then X-Mercs was created differently.

The artists collected three-dimensional scenes, passed them directly to the level designers, who collected levels based on the scenes, from which the designers collected missions. And all this within the framework of one system, one environment, visible to each participant in the process.

Technologies

By the way, another of the problems faced by the developers was that during the development of a massive project by mobile standards, technologies were not just developing quickly, but rapidly, requiring the developers themselves to adapt to this crazy pace.

Game Insight started developing X-Mercs on Unity 3.x, then switched to Unity 3.5, visited Unity 4.3, beta versions of Unity 4.5, went through the entire development cycle of the Unity 4.6.x branch, on which it comes out. Plus, if necessary (for example, to access Windows 10), the game can be launched on Unity 5.

Why so many iterations? To have time not to become outdated, to be among the best.

However, there were no casualties here either. For example, I had to sacrifice support for the iPad 2.

Conclusion

“The game was created and conceived as a mobile project for tablets and phones. During the development of the project, we launched the game on various devices, including Android, Mac, PC, but closer to the completion of the project, we focused on the main platform – iOS,” says Oleg.

And it is within the framework of this platform that the game was released today.

However, as far as can be judged from the Facebook feed of the project manager Alexander Bogdanov, the PC version is also not far off.

We want to finish the material with a remark from Maxim Donskikh, vice president of marketing at Game Insight, who noted in a conversation with us that “work on the game does not stop with the release.”

“Like any game from Game Insight, X-Mercs will be constantly updated with new content and acquire additional features. In the coming months, new locations, missions and equipment will be added, as well as the social component will be constantly developing – it will be possible to unite into clans and participate in battles with other players in new PvP modes,” Maxim noted.