The development of the game industry is inseparable from the promotion of technological innovation, especially in today's wave of industrialization of game research and development, volume technology is becoming a KPI of the technical department of first-line manufacturers.
There are many ways to tackle technology, and the focus of game manufacturers is also different. Taking Lilith as an example, the new game "Sword and Expedition: Departure" (AFK Journey, hereinafter referred to as AFK2) actually expresses the technical idea of this major game manufacturer: technology escorts the gameplay, and all technical iterations are based on the player experience, so as to achieve the ultimate in the efficiency and output quality of the production process.
"AFK2", which was tested overseas on March 27 this year, is the same as Lilith's previous hits "Legend of Xiaoice Ice" and "Sword and Expedition" (hereinafter referred to as AFK), which still focuses on art quality and innovative gameplay, but when it comes to product form, it shows many special features:
In terms of content experience, AFK2 has a new exploration, and although it is based on AFK IP, it is not just a simple "sequel". It integrates the depth of RPG content, the vast exploration gameplay of the big world and the unique charm of numerical cards.
It has been five years since AFK IP, during which the rapid technological breakthrough in the game market has led to the introduction of new products, and when the game fun presented by the old products begins to be single, it is necessary for AFK to upgrade the technology to give players an innovative and rich and diverse fun experience.
In terms of globalization, "AFK2" is a new expression of Lilith's game globalization journey, how to enter the hearts of users in the global market, use technology to solve their worries about the optimization problems, and provide a better game experience, the technical team needs to give new answers.
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand the direction of technological innovation of AFK2: from the perspective of long-term operation, it will continue to serve the production of gameplay content; Extend the interactive charm of the vertical screen mode to the AFK IP, and at the same time satisfy the immersion with the help of high-quality large-world content gameplay; Provide a stable and smooth product experience for players in different markets and devices around the world.
Recently, we chatted with the main program (Li Yunlong) and the head of the engine TA (Xu Jinnan) of "AFK2", how did these technical details land?
Technology presents the vertical screen world, deep and wide, immersive and fun
GameRes Youzi Network: A few years ago, AFK became popular all over the world when it was launched, relying on 2D glass painting + tarot aesthetic painting style, rich card elements and strong strategic gameplay. After the game has been in operation for many years and has entered a mature period, the problem of a relatively single source of fun in the gameplay of numerical card categories has begun to become prominent, and at the same time, the aesthetic fatigue of players has gradually intensified, and AFK is in urgent need of a new round of changes. Looking specifically at AFK2, how did the team unfold?
AFK2 technical team: The technical iteration of "AFK2" chooses to cut from the perspective of 'doing a good job in the big world'. On the one hand, there are not many game products on the market that present the big world with vertical screen devices, and there is market space; On the other hand, vertical screen games only need to be operated with one hand, which also caters to the gaming habits of new players in the short video era. Therefore, the idea of presenting the big world on the vertical screen has a certain exploration value and imagination space.
However, from Lilith's point of view, it is the first attempt to build a vertical screen world, and the technical team is looking for a focus mainly from the two aspects of scenes and characters to present high-quality game content for players.
GameRes: AFK2 focuses on the vertical screen world, so what are the criteria for scene construction?
AFK2 Technical Team: In terms of scenes, AFK2 aims to create a dynamic and stylized world.
The game first adds dynamic and interactive vegetation and small animals, and builds ecosystems according to different geomorphological environments, giving more art on the same screen while ensuring the unity of performance and style. Vegetation is subject to the concept of wind and the amplitude changes depending on the environment and weather.
Secondly, the main perspective of the player in the game is from a top-down perspective, but AFK2 still strives to shape the "height" of the environment. In addition to height fog and distance fog, the technical team also added cloud projection that changes according to different areas to create a sense of space for the scene and make the art more three-dimensional when depicting the world.
And in terms of the overall color and lighting atmosphere that the artists are more concerned about, the game adds a day and night system, and the environment system configuration with 24-hour lighting and ambient color bands embedded in the game is convenient for the artists to adjust freely.
GameRes: It's actually a challenge to make the big world more realistic on different devices. What efforts have you made?
AFK2 Technical Team: We mainly make the big world more realistic by adding a weather system.
Different stories, map characteristics, and corresponding climate change also have their own merits. For example, there are many thunderstorms in the twilight jungle, and sandstorms often occur in the desert. In order to disassemble and realize the visual expression of different weather, TA did a lot of work from a technical point of view. Taking a thunderstorm day as an example, the color of the light source in the overall environment will change, the contrast between light and shadow will be weakened, simulating the atmosphere of a cloudy day, and the TA will use the fog effect to dramatically express the "water vapor rising", and the color and clouds of the skybox will change accordingly. In addition, TA increases the frequency and amplitude of vegetation swings to express the concept of wind changes, and the environment will also randomly strobe + thunder and so on.
We integrated the disassembled and produced visual effects into the weather configuration tool, then fine-tuned the scene and special effects art to achieve the final artistic effect, and finally the planning and story configuration into different areas and story flow.
GameRes: Let's talk about the characters again. What criteria do you follow to design your characters?
AFK2 technical team: The in-game characters adopt a combination of physical rendering and stylized rendering, with the aim of ensuring the art quality of industrial production and a more unified art style, and ensuring the stability of production while being large and full.
In our opinion, the primary purpose of character rendering is to be able to restore the beautiful original art design before improving the dynamic performance, so AFK2 has improved the face shadow shading scheme and expanded some special dynamic effects.
GameRes: What challenges did you encounter during this process?
AFK2 Technical Team: Of course, there were some hiccups along the way. The original art design is static and flat, but the game is three-dimensional, and we often have to solve the problem of the artistic expression of the characters in different lighting environments in the three-dimensional world. For example, in stylized rendering, how to improve the light and shadow performance of the skin? How to differentiate the boundary between light and dark in different light environments? How do you balance the integration and difference between characters and scenes? How do you prevent your character from being overexposed in a dynamic lighting environment? These are all questions that we need to address during the development process.
Frankly, AFK2's render pipeline is a complex system, and when analyzed at the system level, adjustments to both the pipeline and asset production can become very complex and tricky.
In addition, we have done a lot of work that is not so intuitive, but it helps the product to improve its performance. For example, we will customize a set of animation data compression scheme for character performance to ensure that the same data volume can carry richer animation performance. We will even do some film-level performance attempts, such as when the character Ade is opening and drawing cards, some animation keyframes can ensure that the stretch is very elastic without distortion, or make the character have a stronger sense of flesh when bending the limbs.
GameRes: Was there any trial and error during the development of scenes and characters? In other words, what unexpected problems have you encountered?
AFK2 technical team: Of course, for example, the angle of view effect is close to orthogonal, which makes it difficult to use some physical algorithms based on the direction of the line of sight, and the calculated results do not meet the expectations of the artist; Depth maps cannot be used due to rendering performance concerns; The unique style of magic picture book style is difficult to find a reference from predecessors, and trial and error are constantly stepping on pits. In the end, we overcame these difficulties and laid a solid foundation for the display of wonderful content such as the combat system and the story system.
Empower production pipelines with technology to ensure long-term supply
GameRes: When it comes to a big-world game, players tend to value these things: Does it satisfy the desire to explore? Is the game fun enough? Is the content long-term enough? In fact, this requires the technical team not only to help R&D make the gameplay content richer, but also to clarify the production pipeline logic, improve the efficiency of content production, and stably output high-quality content, so as to avoid fluctuations in the positive experience of players. How can this be guaranteed?
AFK2 technical team: For the production pipeline, the starting point of the technical team is to lower the threshold for content production.
Since AFK2 has a top-down view, there is no vertical overlap, which even further improves editing efficiency - map editing, collision detection, pathfinding and other systems only need to be edited on a 2D plane. With the help of automated tools and automated processes, the team was able to automatically generate elements such as cliffs, coastlines, meadows, vegetation, water flow, and splines from the map, as well as mini-maps based on the 3D map, ensuring visual consistency and reducing additional workload.
In the production of AFK2 characters, we also strive to build a system.
The game can automatically generate multiple sets of assets for each character according to the preset configuration to adapt to different usage scenarios, reducing the possibility of errors and ensuring the consistency and quality standards of each asset. In addition, its self-developed NPC editor also supports detailed facial customization and component stitching, which is convenient for generating a large number of NPCs with different styles and appearances. Considering that the game has a large amount of story and voice content, and has a global multi-language voice, the technical team strives to make the character's lip shape system able to analyze the size of the game audio in real time, and then dynamically adapt the character's lip animation to ensure that the character's mouth shape can be accurately synchronized with the speech voice no matter what language it is, so as to achieve the purpose of keeping the game character vivid.
GameRes: In addition to characters and terrain, what other content development has tried to lower the barrier to entry for content production?
AFK2 technical team: We have made a small game module that can be independently designed and produced by the planner, so that they can complete some low-complexity built-in game development by themselves, so that it is convenient to make interesting and rich gameplay for players, so that the big world will not be monotonous because of the big.
The game also has an interactive object system where players can pet cats, catch ducks, and flutter butterflies, all of which are designed to bring players a more vivid world.
In addition, the in-game combat system has also been greatly changed to AFK, and the new combat system has a higher complexity ceiling on the premise of ensuring an excellent numerical system. In order to bring players better performance and cooler combat effects, we have made a new combat terrain editor, as well as a WYSIWYG skill editor.
Skill Editor
GameRes: As the volume of content continues to increase, how can the technical team empower the production pipeline and drive the improvement of R&D efficiency?
AFK2 Technical Team: We have launched a set of optimization solutions to ensure production quality.
At the heart of this approach is a suite of performance check tools, which are also integrated into the game editor, allowing content production teams to quickly and promptly check performance requirements during and after creation. This technology not only significantly improves work efficiency, but also speeds up the launch of game content and ensures high quality. When players are immersed in a game, they enjoy the smoothest gaming experience, and content creators can rest assured that content production will be seamlessly integrated into the game without worrying about performance issues negatively impacting the player experience.
In this way, the logic of AFK2's production pipeline with player experience as the core has become clearer, which also makes the supply capacity of long-term content more guaranteed.
The road to the world, do those "inconspicuous" details well
GameRes: In the era of accelerated globalization of domestic games, game manufacturers are constantly raising the ceiling of content quality in order to achieve lower customer acquisition costs. With this comes a new challenge: players from different countries/regions, different network environments and devices still have some concerns about large-scale and heavy gameplay content. Does the few storage spaces support a wide range of gameplay? So in terms of performance optimization, how does AFK2 do it?
AFK2 Technical Team: The performance optimization of AFK2 starts with device matching.
With a wide variety of devices, it's important to tap into and leverage the potential of your devices to tailor a high-quality experience for them. Therefore, AFK2 implements a set of sophisticated device identification mechanisms in the device matching process, and through its own database, the system can accurately measure the performance of each device, including key parameters such as processing power and graphics rendering ability, and then optimize the game graphics quality, loading speed, and response time according to the performance characteristics of different devices.
And in order to meet the needs of different players, and in order to adapt to the new era of live streaming, we have also developed a separate PC version to bring players the highest quality picture experience.
GameRes: For mobile gamers, power consumption and battery life are a major concern. How can I reduce power consumption?
AFK2 technical team: High-quality graphics mean a lot of computing resources, and if the device is not optimized properly, the battery life and heat dissipation will greatly affect the player's experience. On mobile, AFK2 follows a more flexible set of asset adaptation strategies. The game will reduce the resource consumption in a targeted manner, and the frame rate will run at 30FPS by default, so as to balance the smoothness of the picture and the power consumption as much as possible. In fact, we found that more than half of the gamers prefer to choose 60FPS mode, which means that the power consumption will be twice as high as the default, and with this in mind, the game implements dynamic frame rate management strategies, such as locking the frame rate at 30FPS when AFK auto-battle mode (players tend to be less likely to look at the screen continuously), and puts a lot of effort into the aspect of image quality grading control.
GameRes: How are packages optimized? This is also a perennial question.
AFK2 technical team: In order to suppress the volume expansion of resource packs, the game customizes and compresses map data, intelligently divides the map and reuses resources as much as possible, and currently can control the size of map resources within 500MB. In addition, character animation, as the largest resource occupancy in the game, also uses animation compression technology to optimize the keyframe data, remove unnecessary frames, and determine an acceptable minimum error range, ensuring the quality of the animation while reducing resources by 50%. Without sacrificing the quality of the game and the user experience, AFK2 controls the entire package on the mobile terminal within 4GB.
In Lilith, the "volume" technique is from another dimension
As a company that has been established for more than 10 years, has popular models and has rich experience in going overseas, Lilith knows very well where her longboard is.
In the field of cards that Lilith is good at, in the past ten years, they have handed over the answer sheet represented by "Xiaoice Ice Legend" and "AFK", and led the trend of Dota Legend like and AFK like in gameplay innovation, and accumulated high-quality player reputation. Lilith's core competitiveness to win the market lies in the gameplay and quality, and it is not difficult to understand that the main direction of the technical team will still firmly serve the core gameplay of the product, and not blindly pursue the absolute leadership of technology.
In the game industry, technology can directly improve the production efficiency and quality of content, bring richer content and faster iteration speed, and can also optimize the efficiency of the production pipeline, accurately empowering technical resources to gameplay, and refining the experience every minute. Both have their own strengths, and the key is for game companies to find their own direction.
A more realistic example is that Nintendo, which does not pursue absolute technological advancement, still sold 61.97 million units on Switch with its rich and diverse gameplay; On the other hand, in the past few years when game manufacturers have sounded the horn of industrialization, the independent game team has not declined, but has come up with a number of interesting masterpieces, finding entry points in categories such as io, auto-chess, roguelike, etc., and even affecting the industry outlet, such as Poncle, the developer of "Vampire Survivors", who is not known for its advanced technology, but has returned to the fun nature of the game.
As Lilith said in the introduction, "to provide players around the world with a gaming experience that exceeds expectations", this vision has not changed in "Xiaoice Ice Legend", "AFK", "AFK2" and other self-developed games. Players' recognition of Lilith's global game brand is also based on the company's always player-centric products.
It is true that companies with leading technology are often able to quickly gain a competitive advantage in the market, and long-term technical optimization based on the characteristics and needs of the product can maximize the efficiency and output quality of the production pipeline, so that every iteration can win the praise of players, which I believe is still the most scarce skill in the gaming industry.