Chennai based Smackall Games, founded and spearheaded by Harishankar Narayanan is all set to release their 3d game Dragon VS Goblin 3d on iOS platform.
Till date, Smackall, that specializes in game programming, porting, 3d art assets, animation has delivered 100+ gaming titles including 30 in-house games for different platforms. Also, the studio has been development partners for publishers around the globe. Their success story include gaming title “iCopter Classic” developed for iOS which reached 5 million downloads and topped the iTunes chart in years 2009 and 2010.
AnimationXpress.com recently caught up with Harishankar to know more about the game play and technologies that went into creating Dragon VS Goblin 3d
Here are the excerpts…
How would you pitch Dragon VS Goblin 3D?
A fresh new genre that is yet to take over the market! Most of us have experienced enough of cute and cuddly creatures. Be it in animation films, movies or games. These cute creatures have gotten away with some really nasty exploits. The goblins are no less and they have played havoc with Dean the dragon’s life. And he is not taking it lying down! He has to go destroy the goblins’ village on the floating islands of Keerta to get his girl and his kid back! The tag line of our game is “Exe’cute” and our studio dictionary describes it as “Exe’cute: [ek-si-kyoot] to inflict capital punishment on; crush or put to death something that is cute; assassinate cuteness.” This is the thread that connects the levels. From a gamers’ perspective you have all the destruction that you can possibly ask for with hundreds of objects that tumble down and explode all over.
What kind of gameplay does title have?
It is a single player RPG game with different levels and achievements to complete.
You will come across Physics Destruction and simulation in 3D. Frankly speaking, it was our very successful 2D physics game by the same name that inspired us to create Dragon VS Goblin 3D. And, secondly our wish to create something radical!
Why 3D?
In recent past, 2D physics destruction games have seen large success in the mobile gaming industry. The ultimate selling point for the successful games in the 2D physics genre was the immersive physics experience together with simple unique gameplay concepts.
The immersive physics experience comes directly from the number of dynamic objects that the game can simulate. However, the same is not achievable in 3d, because of technical constraints. Very less games in 3d physics genre give the user a complete immersive experience as it requires much more CPU horse power than the mobile devices can offer. The games already in this genre hardly simulates more than 50 dynamic objects in the entire world, which is very low for immersive experience whereas most of the levels in our game, have 400+ objects, which I believe is a technical achievement.
To make such advanced 3D physics simulation possible on mobile platform, we had to completely rewrite the whole game engine ourselves. Starting from rendering engine, to optimizing physics engines, we had to rethink everything to achieve a cool 3d Physics effect. We looked out for a decent 3D physics game for mobile devices that might be available in the market. We didn’t find and finally settled to create our own game engine
Can we have a credit run down for this game?
The game engine, physics implementation has been designed and overseen, key people of Smackall, Anjan Cariappa and Udhay Shankar have given creative inputs for 3d generation and concept art, P.Vivek has been the Senior Game Engine Programmer, N.Palaniappan and Ranjith have taken care of 3d, Concept art, Animation and Sasikumar and Venkata gobi looked after designing the game levels and game testing.
Please elaborate more on the visual aspects of the game?
The visual design has been kept simple and in an easy layout. The interface also includes tried and tested design cues. When we say simple, it doesn’t mean that the objects are basic shapes. The strength of our Typhoon game engine is its ability to render complex shapes. We have used this ability to the optimum so that the player gets a seamless gaming experience. The objects do not look crude but at the same time run at a good frame rates.
So all the programming for this game has been done in Typhoon?
Yes! Our proprietary game Engine, “Typhoon” was built from scratch using C++ to keep it cross-platform ready. The engine supports 6 different physics engines to integrate. We have used every possible CPU benefits to make it possible for the engine to handle such loads.
Could you elaborate more on how does the Typhoon engine work?
The Typhoon Engine was designed with a challenge of simulating 500 objects in real-time 3d physics. We were able to take the number up to 550 in some levels. All the under laying parts of our engine were completely reworked to build such games with high CPU/GPU requirements. The engine takes advantages of some special CPU instructions and features to perform the intense calculations. Without these special features, it is neither possible to render 500+ objects in 3d nor simulate them in physics. This is the reason why other games have not crossed the 50 object limits. o get our engine to this point, we considered 6 different Physics libraries and 4 different rendering libraries to integrate in our engine. We chose the simplest among them and optimize the libraries for such special purpose game effects.
On which platforms is the game releasing?
It will launch on iOS soon. And we have plans to release it for Android and Windows Phone. Our Engine is also ready for Windows PC and Mac OSX which will follow.