An Unreal Week
What a week it has been. As you may have heard, the game engine we had chosen to use for the first Archmagus project, Unity, had a pretty rotten week due to some pretty rotten decisions leadership had made over there, presumably because they've never been a profitable company and at a time when money is no longer cheap, being profitable has become more important to them.
While the licensing terms that Unity had introduced would not have significantly affected Archmagus as we are not in the F2P space (I think Genshin Impact may have felt a little bit called out), the concern that this could be the beginning of a "pray the deal isn't altered any further" pact with Darth Vader caused us to decide it would be prudent to explore some alternatives. Besides, if we're being honest, we weren't that deep in with any particular game engine yet in the grand scheme of things.
Enter Unreal, the game engine we had initially eschewed in favor of Unity because frankly Unreal was intimidating. The quality of the renders the Unreal team puts out had always seemed beyond the needs for Archmagus and there was some concern that productivity of the team could be impacted in order to support such apparent high-quality requirements. It turns out such concerns seem to be unfounded based on our research so far. In fact, Unreal provides two massive productivity boosts that we have uncovered so far. The first, Lumen, is an Unreal Engine 5 technology that vastly improves the speed and quality of light support in experiences compared to anything else we've seen. Just check out the quality of the runtime lighting in this box. Nothing here is baked; move any of these objects around and the reflected light just updates automatically. It's incredible.
A demo of the power of Unreal Engine’s Lumen technology
Second, any experiences built using Unreal Engine get full and free access to an insanely rich library of materials and models that are just as good as all those amazing Unreal demo reels we were intimidated by originally. For a small team, this is a godsend of resources that now we do not have to build or buy ourselves. See a small sample of the materials below in a demo level we built to play with them:
In less Deep Tech news (thank you for sticking with us), we now have two major projects that we are exploring as our potential first project for Archmagus. We are really excited to bring both of these to life; whichever we decide to craft first, it will hurt terribly to need to postpone the second one, but on the plus side, we won't need to worry about post-release depression once our first project goes out the door as the second one already beckons. We have started to enter the storyboarding phase -- having a published author on the team really helps! -- and we are looking forward to providing POCs and demos of our work as it starts to materialize. As you can probably tell, both of these experiences already feel special to us; we are going to be delighted to bring them to you.
One final update in an already-long post (we told you it has been a full week!): Justin is going to be going to Unreal Fest in October, so if you are in New Orleans between October 2nd and October 7th, be sure to reach out so we can connect. It would be great to see as many folks as possible while at the conference. As long as I remember to bring them, you can even have one of our snazzy new business cards, so professional are we.
As ever,
Justin @ Archmagus
