This article is from the "Lilith Game" public account
Kaiding, who has been with Tencent Northern Lights Studio since 2010, has been working as a client developer and engine developer for "Tianya Mingyue Knife", after leaving northern lights, and returned to Tencent in 2017 to join nexT studios and start the incubation and production of the independent game "Only Big Adventure". After its launch, "Only Big Adventure" won numerous indie game awards such as the Indie Cade Europe 2019 Audience Choice Award, the Indie Prize Asia 2019 Best Game Design, and an IGF (Indie Game Festival) nomination.
Kaidin joined Lilith in 2020 as the leader of the rendering team for the research project.
First, from MMO to indie games
Knowing that you entered the game industry since you graduated, remember your first job?
Of course. Because I myself prefer to play games and make games, my first job after graduating from college first joined Tencent Northern Lights Studios, and I had the honor of working with a group of ashes-level game industry insiders from Ubisoft to participate in the production of "Tianya Mingyue Knife". When I first entered, I did a lot of GPP (Gameplay Programming) related things such as light work and pathfinding in the knife. Since I was maintaining a self-developed engine in college and had a strong obsession with game engines, I switched to engine development work again.
Now many students want to turn the engine, but not necessarily so smoothly.
I don't think it was necessarily a good decision to spin the engine at the time, but I did learn a lot from the engine team. In fact, as long as you are deep enough in game development, you will definitely reach the bottom of the engine, and the engine is not only rendering.
But why did you choose to leave the team?
At that time, I did not think about changing jobs very clearly, mainly due to some personal immaturity reasons chose to leave, and then joined the new company and found that the difference with expectations was relatively large. Fortunately, by chance, the team of "Dragon Valley" was working on optimization-related content, and some memory problems were not solved. They found me online and wanted me to help see if the memory problem could be optimized. After that, I gave some optimization suggestions, so they invited me to work on the Dragon Valley project together. In the end, the closed development was closed for three or four months, and the project was successfully pushed online, and the work experience that did not meet expectations at the beginning had a good result.
Since then, I have been thinking about my attitude to the game and my pursuit. I was really a person who was more obsessed with technology, but later found out that the original driving force for me to make games was not because I liked the game engine, but because I liked the game itself. It just so happened that Tencent NExT was engaged in independent games at that time, which was more attractive to me, so I returned to Tencent and joined the NExT studio.
So are you back at Tencent again because of the opportunity to make indie games?
yes. Another reason is that there were a lot of new york university graduates at that time, and they could meet different people, which was quite interesting. They definitely have something more unique in terms of design. After that, I did meet a little friend, and I worked with him to hatch a very interesting thing, which is the prototype of "Only Big Adventure".
At that time, there was a game jam inside NEXT, and after I had the idea, I worked with the kid to make the idea into a demo in a week. After the basic gameplay and mechanics were confirmed, it took almost two or three days to do a complete level out.
For two or three days, the landing ability sounds very strong!
Two or three days can be landed, which can be done on the basis of technical verification.
In the beginning we wanted to make a climbing game, similar to "Humanity Is Defeated". Then we went to study the game, as well as similar indie games, and found that there were some technical points that were very fun. For example, the character in "Human Defeat" is soft and decadent, and the performance of this character is not driven by animation, but based on physics. With this front-facing technical verification, only then can the later levels land quickly.
The game screen of "Humanity Is Defeated"
So how did this idea become "Only Big Adventure"?
Doing physics games themselves, all the physics parameters are very testing the ability of designers or gameplay people to adjust the feel. We've also looked at other similar games, like Gang Beasts, which are programmed to animate, and we've been experimenting with similar animation systems. Later, based on the gameplay derived from this animation system, a game similar to the jumping platform was made. Until this time, our game characters were still humanoid, the kind with two arms and two legs. Finally, when I was having a brain attack with a big brother in New York, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration, and I planned to cut off my hand and not be humanoid. This design is simple to control, two joysticks can be operated, and can do almost any human creature can do, very different from traditional games.
Only Big Adventure game graphics
What are your main responsibilities for after the project officially begins production?
In the early stage, it is mainly design-level work, gameplay, and some technical solutions, that is, physical-based animation technology solutions. In the middle and late stages, it is mainly program-based, responsible for some performance framework Pipeline (pipeline), etc., but also includes cooperation with art and planning, how to better let them work.
Second, the beauty of independent games
What is the charm of indie games for you?
Most commercial games may only push the boundaries of technology, but indie games can push the boundaries of game design. First of all, indie games can control more, rather than simply screwing under some industrial pipeline. At the same time, indie games are a collision of minds, and working with them will understand how their way of thinking is, and you can learn a lot. In addition, the most suitable for indie games is the T-type talent, which means that the person is familiar with most areas of game development, and there is a field that is particularly deep.
Is there anything about this indie game experience that you find particularly memorable?
Overall, it was memorable because it was a commercial project that had been done before. After making "Only Big Adventures," I felt that there was a big difference in the way indie and commercial games were made—indie games were driven entirely by ideas, not commercially. Usually commercial game production is a genre + plot content, plot content is a very important part, the gameplay may be mature and fixed. Therefore, the production idea of "Only Big Adventure" is completely anti-, and it is necessary to prioritize the gameplay mechanism, and the story and plot content are not so important. This can refer to Nintendo's game, there is almost no concept of the plot, it is completely pure gameplay, and the gameplay is very interesting.
Tap Tap Rating for Only Big Adventure
How is this difference in the development ideas of different games reflected in the work?
I think it's very important that teams in independent games need to be able to verify more quickly, and they can't pick up on demand and follow this need step by step. Indie games need to be able to quickly verify whether the game is good or not. Of course, indie game development is also staged, and our game really started to roll out for three or four months, and the previous period was basically doing prototype verification and thinking about what kind of levels to do.
Third, a very special thing
What made you join Lilith?
At that time, after doing "Only Big Adventure", the direction of the entire NExT began to gradually deviate from the indie game, and I began to look at the opportunities outside. A very important factor in my project selection is to see if the team is doing something very special. My choice and positioning of my career direction was to either completely control the indie game, or the project team was doing a very special thing, which was how NExT's indie game project attracted me. Lilith is the same today, because my project is special.
Towards the end of 2020, I was still in the stage of understanding Lilith, but I thought it was a promising direction at first glance. There were several teams working on similar projects, and I chose Lilith because I chose a team in the middle that I felt was relatively reliable and good.
Screenshot of the in-game light rendering
What are you currently responsible for?
Mainly responsible for rendering. When I first joined Lilith, the rendering ability of the whole project was seriously insufficient, and the art production process was also problematic. A lot of things aren't data-driven, processes aren't automated enough, and there are too many things that need to be understood by the artist. So our team built a relatively complete and forward-looking rendering pipeline this year, and this pipeline will be open to all of the company's projects in the future. In addition, the production process of art based on Lowpoly (low polygon, a retro futuristic style design) also has a relatively big problem, when the art is to upgrade and iterate, it is necessary to upgrade all the data, which is very unreasonable.
Was this the bigger problem you had when you first joined?
Yes, the first thing I did when I joined the group was to upgrade the Lowpoly process of art. Of course, this process was replaced with a more industrialized process due to changes in our overall rendering style, but it was still seamlessly embedded in this process.
For me, it's a very important thing to work well with art and planning, and doing a lot of things programmatically is actually to avoid art or planning mistakes. To use a metaphor that may not sound very good - the starting point of our work is to first assume that they will make mistakes, so it is necessary to avoid them from making mistakes from the program, so as to maximize efficiency.
After you join the project, you pull through the entire rendering pipeline, which makes the overall quality of the game have been greatly improved. Can you talk about what iterations have been done to have the current presentation effect?
This pipeline is LitRenderPipeline (abbreviated LitRP, L stands for lilith, lighting), which integrates many features while also considering compatibility, such as multi-light sources and high-quality shadows. At the same time, we abandoned Lightmap (a static global illumination technique that is offline baked to textures) in favor of a more project-friendly Cinematic GI (a globe-based global illumination technology) system for improving global illumination and making it easier for artists and even players.
Comparison chart before and after lighting effects optimization
Is this a big challenge for you?
The overall difficulty is not very large, mainly to patiently advance step by step, the most difficult of which may be to do Pipeline to consider a lot of compatibility. For example, before doing indie games, it was easy to do it only by considering the PC or host, but the hardware of the mobile game was not the same as the PC. And at this stage, the project is a little more oriented to Southeast Asia, so the user model is relatively poor. One of the important problems to solve when starting with LitRP is multi-light sources. The multi-light scheme is also adapted to OpenGL 3.0 models as much as possible. Basically, overseas machines can run, maybe a little slower, but not unsupported.
At present, your project has opened the overseas purchase test, is there any problem for you at this stage?
The biggest problem with rendering now is mainly the uniformity of subsequent resources. For a product like ours, resource unification is very important. When we choose technology, we basically consider the appropriateness of the project, rather than stacking advanced technology. Technology is only suitable for fit, there is no so-called high or not advanced. For example, Lightmap, the GI scheme is definitely the best lightmap effect. But for our project, especially when we want to face non-professional developers such as players later, Lightmap's baking time is too long, requiring its understanding of the technology to be more in-depth, so we finally chose the Program of Volumetric GI. The GPU Driven (a technology that can greatly reduce the number of Pullcalls on the CPU side by processing cropping, initiating drawing commands, etc. on the GPU side, thereby improving the overall efficiency) is also based on the above point of view, considering that players may stuff a lot of mesh into the scene, there is no way to do a good optimization, and GPU Driven can solve this problem very well.
In-game effects demo
Fourth, it is a game developer, but also a lover
I heard that you especially like to play games.
I'm a "Nintendo game fan" and particularly like Nintendo games, the Mario series should be my favorite, and the N64 version of The Legend of Zelda: Mask of Mezura is also particularly fond. In general, I prefer games with more gameplay and clever mechanics. Now I have little interest in AAA games, not that the quality of AAA games is not good enough, but in my opinion, some narratives or scenes are very grand and beautiful games, and I will think why not just shoot movies directly? It's a bit tiring to play.
I have also played games for a long time, from the GBA (GAME BOY ADVANCE, is the second generation of portable game consoles released by Nintendo on March 21, 2001) period fell in love with games, when the phone was still black and white, suddenly saw a machine with color graphics, the picture is also very good, was attracted.
After talking about it, I found that you are not actually a technician, but a game producer, can you say that?
So to speak. I think it is useless to pursue technology alone, and technology must eventually have a place to land. I myself first of all love the game, but also like to delve into technology, but if the technology is finally to land in the game, you can't just study the technology, but also understand other aspects. So my requirements for the crew are to have T and P and A (technology, planning, art). The needs of others are best to go through them first, and they can't pick them up and do it.
I think a good technician is also a good product manager. First of all, some technicians may be inherently user-oriented, such as some programmers who do gameplay great, and the final path is to become a producer. Even if some technical positions are not directly user-oriented, but are oriented within the group, then the members of the group are also your users. Therefore, product awareness is a very important part of measuring the comprehensive ability of a technician.
It feels like your project experience is going well, is there anything really difficult for you?
What's really difficult for me may be learning how to communicate with different people, how to take the initiative to drive projects, how to change my obsession with the engine, how to make teams work instead of individuals. These are all difficulties that come with a change in perceptions, a change in the people we work with, a change in positions, and for me these difficulties are much more difficult to deal with than when I actually encounter technical problems.
What personal improvements do you usually do?
In terms of game design, I will look at the design of various indie games on Twitter, and I will touch more games, and the indie games on Steam will basically be played. For the engine side, look at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) video and some papers.
In fact, I maintained a small toy engine before, and I have been doing it since college, completely developing it myself. There were no early engines to refer to, especially open source ones. At the time, the open source engine seemed to have only Ogre (a game making engine), so I looked at how it was done and added some of my own stuff to it. After working, I found that what I wrote before was still relatively green, and many design concepts were very backward, and I continued to improve.
How did you come up with the idea of making an engine yourself?
My fate with programming actually began quite early, junior high school coincidence, in the recommendation of the teacher to go down a program competition, at that time began to contact programming. Plus I also like to play games, and I thought the game was so magical, it could turn those pictures into something I could manipulate and move. After that, in high school, I began to have the idea of making games, and after entering college, I naturally chose to major in computer science. At that time, I set the direction for myself - I must make games in the future! So I made the engine to make games, and at that time I also used this small engine to make a small game online.
Finally, do you have anything to say to all of you who want to be an engine and a game lover who wants to do technology?
I think I have to ask myself before I get into the industry – do you want to make games or do you want to do technology? The advice given to doing games and doing technology is different. Overall, it is also good for newcomers to do gameplay, don't run to the engine and render at the beginning, especially people who like games.
I drew a circle for myself, this circle is the circle of knowledge in the field of games, if I want to make games, I must expand this circle of knowledge, and technology is my starting point. Taking technology as the starting point, I slowly found that I still have to know more about technology, but also to understand what art thinks, but also to understand planning, and the knowledge at these levels must be broadened one by one. But the most important thing is to know what your goals are, and the technology you want to do is still a great game product. Knowing what you like, what you want to pursue, and what you really love can avoid detours.