We are the Arcane Gaming development team, developing games since 2021. As of now, we have two major projects: Fanbattle and Suetologia. The time has come for us to take part in the Ludum Dare gaming hackathon for the first time.
Game economy design of Premium games through the example of a 4X strategy on PC
Medium
9 min
Case
Translation
How to design an economy for your game? The answer to this question might require a series of lectures or articles. The fundamental difference in the approach is based, first of all, on monetization model: F2P or B2P. The second thing that defines the approach to developing an economy system is game genre. This article reviews the case of designing the game economy for a B2P (premium) game, which doesn’t involve earning on microtransactions.
Technical Game Design. Configs, balance and content in the example of PC strategy
Medium
13 min
Case
Translation
One of the common tasks that both beginners and experienced game designers face is describing a large amount of content to pass its parameters to the engine. This is not an easy task, given that it is very difficult to find materials on the technical aspects of game design. Well, let’s figure out how to transfer data to the engine.
Analysis of UE5 Rendering Technology: Nanite
8 min
Tutorial
After Epic released the UE5 technology demo at the beginning of 2021, the discussion about UE5 has never stopped. Related technical discussions mainly centered on two new features: global illumination technology Lumen and extremely high model detail technology Nanite. There have been some articles [1 ][2] analyzing Nanite technology in more detail. This article mainly starts from the RenderDoc analysis and source code of UE5, combined with some existing technical data, aims to provide an intuitive and overview understanding of Nanite, and clarify its algorithm principles and design ideas, without involving too many source code level Implementation details.
UE5 Lumen Implementation Analysis
4 min
Tutorial
Lumen is UE5’s GI system, it is different from the traditional real-time GI which only includes the contribution of indirect diffuse reflection. It also includes indirect diffuse reflection and indirect highlight, providing a new set of complete indirect lighting. Lumen supports both hardware-based RTX and software-based Trace algorithms. The starting point of this article is that Lumen GI uses the process, algorithm, and data structure analysis of indirect diffuse reflection part based on software Trace to understand the basic principle and operation mechanism of Lumen from a macro perspective.
The core of Lumen includes the following parts:
Unity Performance Optimization Ⅵ: Resource Memory Leak
3 min
Today, we will share some knowledge points related to resource memory leak. A memory leak is the most common issue that we continuously see and also are afraid of. What is the reason behind it? Because we can’t predict the extent of the leak before we locate the leak bottleneck, we had no idea whether it will burst out at a certain moment on the line. We have received feedback from developers that their players had no problem playing for half an hour, but they would get more and more stuck after 3 to 4 hours of playing, which they never expected before. How can it be solved? Today’s sharing will answer such questions.
UWA’s GOT Online-Assets report has a resource occupancy trend chart. If there is a rising trend like the one below, you must pay special attention.
Water Simulation
5 min
So, I finally found a moment to write a bit about how we created the water for TReload. Our basic goal was to flood all of the levels with acid - a lot of acid, as the flooded area is massive :) Here’s one of the results which we got out of this process:
12 Tech Trends Every Java Developer Must Learn To Win The Game In 2021
7 min
The previous year has been very distressing for businesses and employees. Though, software development didn’t get so much affected and is still thriving. While tech expansion is continuing, Java development is also going under significant transformation.
The arrival of new concepts and technologies has imposed a question mark on the potential of Java developers. From wearable applications to AI solutions, Java usage is a matter of concern for peers.
Moreover, it is high time that developers enhance their skills as to the changing demands of the industry. If you are a Java developer, surely you too would be wondering what I am talking about what things you should learn.
A bit about our currently nameless game company, and what we’re working on at the moment
4 min
Hey everyone! I represent a game studio without a name, and the project we’re working on goes by the technical name of "CGDrone". I started writing this article earlier today, having tortured myself for ages with sketches, colours, algorithms and correcting bugs in rotations based on quaternions (the last one just about finished me off). You can probably understand I needed a break.
I’ve often come across stories people have posted online about how they made their game, the difficulties they faced, and the result they achieved at the end. Likewise, our team has its own story, and I’d like to share a bit about it.
Fatal Fight: How we've got 5 million organic installs?
8 min
The story of Fatal Fight started in 2015. The time when going global and having 5 million downloads on Google Play Store seemed to be a dream of every game developer.
In this article, I will talk about the way we converted the dream into our actual reality. To make it super understandable, find a guide below where I will cover all the stages of development of Fatal Fight and even more.
Research
The idea of Fatal Fight hasn't just come from nowhere. Before understanding what game to develop, we needed to research what are the current gaps in the mobile games market. And, to come to this point, we took several steps.
First, we analyzed what are the most searchable mobile games in the Google Play Store. It turned out, the top 3 mobile games that users were looking for were the following:
- Puzzle Games
- Car Games
- Fighting Games
Here we narrowed down our research. We were playing most downloaded games from each category to figure out if those games meet users’ needs while trying to answer what kind of challenges they have with those games.
As a result, Puzzle and Car Games had a wide range of mobile games with pretty nice UI/UX design and other characteristics. However, during the testing of the fighting games, the picture was quite different.
We were surprised by the fact that we could not find any proper games with satisfactory features. And I believe, not only we but also the dozens of users who were craving for favorable experience while playing a fighting game.
While asking ourselves the question “Why?” we found out that the main reason was the gameplay. The interaction between users and the games was complex. It was not comfortable to manage punching, kicking, jumping and other possible moves separately or even all at once on a smartphone.
Make it easier to get finished: Interview with John Romero, developer of Doom
12 min
At the last Tech Train IT festival, we met the legendary John Romero, who designed and developed the iconic Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. We talked about whether game developers need soft skills, which working tools to pay attention to, and which co-founder of Id Software's favorite toys are. Questions were asked by Nikita Tsaplin, the founder of RUVDS.
→ Text and video in Russian
→ Text and video in Russian
Making games is [not] hard. Looking back at small mobile project on Unity3D
11 min
When you have an idea of a new game mechanic, or even flash of interesting concept — soon you'll be obsessed about it with an immense urge to start doing something already. Sometimes you write such ideas down somewhere and bring them a chance to ignite full development cycle later. But I've stumbled upon the opposite action. My current game became this giant monster eating finance and time, and grown much bigger than I ever thought. So, I've needed to put it back for a while. But I could not sit without game development, and in my free time I've started to work on my new project! Plus that one was quite different from the previous ones, because I've decided to target mobile. If you are interested in how this project was done, from a small idea to the final release, then let's dive into it!
Top game development companies in the world
21 min
The game industry is growing, especially among small, independent development companies. If you're looking for a game development company, let's take a glimpse at some top game development companies ranked, basing the list on games, as well as the number of existing players and uniqueness.
My and my girlfriend’s first video game. Development with Unity. Part 1
7 min
If not to take into account releases for Android and a dozen of abandoned projects just before they were ready, then yes, it is our first game appropriate for more than one platform. How did it all start? Very simply. We worked on another project, let’s call it “project A”, and we’d been working on it for a long time when we decided to make a game during a couple of months and use it to train our marketing skills, and then immediately release our “project A” when we would be more experienced in the promotion of games. But the plan failed and “project A” was kept untouched for the whole year. But this story isn’t about “project A”, it’s about a logical game called «Cubicity: Slide puzzle».
Levelord, an Ordinary Moscow Resident: Interview with the Creator of Duke Nukem
20 min
RUVDS together with Habr.com continues the series of interviews with interesting people in computer field. Previously we met Boris Yangel, who heads AI development of Yandex’s Alice voice assistant.
Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.
These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.
→ Text and video in Russian
Today we bring you an interview with Richard (Levelord) Gray — level designer of such legendary games as Duke Nukem, American McGee Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, and Serious Sam. And he is the one who coined the famous phrase «You are not supposed to be here». Richard was born and spent most of his life in USA, but several years ago he moved to Moscow to his russian wife and daughter.
These who speak to Richard are Nick Zemlyanskiy, editor of Habr.com, and Nikita Tsaplin, co-founder and managing partner of RUVDS company.
→ Text and video in Russian
How to promote an incremental game? Free of charge, fast and effective*
1 min
Tutorial
If you ever created a game, you probably ran into the same problem as a lot of game developers before you: nobody knows about your game. In the article, I will tell you how to promote an incremental** game for free, fast and somehow effective.
Global Game Jam 2019 (announcement)
1 min
In the end of January Global Game Jam 2019 will be hosted. 26 and 27 of January will be hottest days of the month! GGJ is annual event about creating games (for those who don't know what Game Jame is). This is onsite event lasting 48h.
Creator of while True: learn() on programming in game development, VR issues and machine learning simulation
22 min
Translation
A few years ago I had a feeling that Oleg Chumakov (then working at the game studio Nival) was the most famous programmer in the game development industry. He was giving speeches, hosted Gamesjams and frequently showed up on the podcast How games are made.
When VR hit the market, Oleg was chosen to lead the company’s new department — NivalVR. But, as you probably know, VR didn’t quite take off as much as people expected.
I kind of moved to other to other things in life and stopped keeping up with game development for a while, but after getting into it again I noticed that things were looking up for Oleg’s team. Now it’s called Luden.io, and their machine learning expert simulator, while True: learn() became a huge hit in its admittedly small niche. Lots of cool stories are happening around the game and the team.
We decided to do an interview with Oleg, but I couldn’t stick to one topic — his life up to this moment has been, for the lack of a better word, “interesting”. He’s seen it all. And, to ensure that a programmer could talk about programming without fear of looking too “nerdy”, the interview was conducted by my friend, colleague and an experienced developer of its own fillpackart.