Epic Citadel - lean, mean development

The recent outing on iPhone of the amazing looking Unreal Engine 3 demo entitled Epic Citadel (available free) by Epic really shows the underlying capability of the hardware that current mobile devices have. In short, it’s like nothing you’ve seen on any iOS device so far. But is it all good for game developers?

I’m reminded when I see such apparent wonders of technology that actually, this is what most developers can achieve if they’re prepared to go as low down in the API as they can, right down the HAL if possible. The closer you get, the more layers of noisy slow API you get past and the more precious CPU & GPU time you get to spend on your content.

I’m also reminded of the fat, lazy techniques that it’s easy to get away with when you’ve got a lot of CPU & GPU power to play with on most non-portable systems such as PS3 / X360 / PC / Mac.

Why bother to optimise your artwork, level design, code when you can just let the video card do all of the work for you? This is a bad attitude.

Sloppy implementation really hurts handheld devices and the best teams know how to be lean with their systems and really squeeze every ounce out of the available hardware. This is generally good practice anyway.

As an example for iPhone; If you can, go straight past COCOS2D / Unity / Prime to EAGL and Open GL ES. From here low-level code, smart techniques, clever level design and diligent artists will all combine to get you a great, fast experience. I appreciate it’s tougher to do but the benefits are worth the effort.

If you’re not careful, the danger then is adding in fat such as scripting languages such as LUA or UE3 Kismet (Unreal’s embedded scripting language) that cost you performance to interpret at run-time.

You should also consider the type of game you make. I’ve personally work on a few UE3 titles and from personal experience, and many game devs will tell you, UE3 is great at making Gears of War type games. The further you get away from doing short-view FPS games, the more and more of UE3 you have to re-write to make it work. Just ask the team on APB who tried to make an open-world MMO using it.

Try and think about this when you’re setting out with your system architecture and you’re choosing your low-level systems that you’re going to build everything on top of. Make sure it’s right, make sure it’s going to stand the test of time and get the game *you* want to make.

Check out what can be achieved in just 4,096 bytes if you try.