Feature

Development debate: Is a sense of community giving mobile devs the edge over their console cousins?

Part 2: Sharing is caring

Development debate: Is a sense of community giving mobile devs the edge over their console cousins?
Without the resources of large studios, many independent mobile developers opt to create their games using third party engines – especially Unity, as discussed in part 1.

The result of this, of course, is that a huge community has sprung up around the tool, with developers offering both support and practical technical solutions to problems encountered by their peers as their collective experience with the toolset grows.

One of the developers tapping into this new style of collaborative develelopment is Kwalee, the studio started by Codemasters founder, David Darling.

Making the transitionThe nature of Kwalee, being formed by former console game makers, has meant that the new era of online development communities has brought major benefits to the company by reducing their learning curves in the transition to mobile.

Andrew Graham is the gameplay guru at the studio. He is currently working in Unity, but his last project was a PC game using Unreal Engine 3.

He has experienced almost every major platform over the years, having masterminded the Micro Machines series at Codemasters.

Andrew's contrasting experiences with Unreal and Unity are an insightful look into the different worlds of console and mobile development.


Unity 4's animation tool Mecanim

"Game development gets easier all the time," says Graham.

"Today's mobile dev tools are much more accessible because of the huge development community online. With Unity, the instant you have a question you can type it into Google and find a solution. In the old days you'd struggle on your own or even need to get a book from the library.

"With Unreal 3, there was not the same level of support. People are more willing to help each other out in the mobile community."

Building from a base

Andrew's colleague at Kwalee, Pete Hancox, recently switched to mobile game development after a stint at Eurocom where he worked on Harry Potter Kinect.

After coming off a console game created with an engine designed in-house, Pete was pleasantly surprised by the support offered through Unity's network of developers.

"Unity's whole philosophy is to add new functions to its existing engine," offers Pete.

"The core framework is actually quite basic so you do need a lot of extra plugins to achieve your goals, but there is a whole community built around sharing, which I never experienced making console games.

"The indie community would not have taken off the way it did without so many studios using a modular engine like Unity.

"It encourages collaborative problem solving. Unity has seen the need to build a community and provide an engine which supports multiple platforms. They have been very intelligent."

In contrast to Unity's support network, Pete describes the difficulties of the in-house engines he has been used to in the past.

"Game engines are like cars. Unless you designed the components and understand how to make them run efficiently you will never be a good engineer," he adds.

"If you develop tools in-house you need to treat them like a commercial product to make sure everyone can use them without issues and understand them fully."

United we stand

Not only are Unity developers benefiting from the move towards collaborative problem solving, but the engine itself is constantly improved through community feedback. Unity CEO, David Helgason, explains how the process works.

"Unity is the most used engine on mobile," he begins.

"This puts us in touch with thousands upon thousands of great studios and over a million individual developers, students and hobbyists.

"They put Unity through its paces and tell us how to improve it. We also visit studios that are pushing Unity particularly hard. We embed our best engineers with them. We take feedback through both public and private channels."


Unity 4 realtime rendering demo 'The Butterly Effect'


Helgason's position paints a fascinating picture of an age of game development driven by communities comprising of multiple developers all working together.

Clearly, such forms of 'crowdsourcing' have massively benefited many mobile studios, but could the same thing work in the console world?

With new systems just around the corner, budgets are likely to increase even further. Every console game is a massive risk for its publisher so collaboration and the sharing of solutions in console game creation seems far-fetched.

Sharing best practice in console development might seem like giving away competitive advantage, but for mobile studios it might just be giving them just the strategic boost they need to take on their triple-A peers.

You can read part 1 of our development debate here.

Joseph Barron previously served as Kwalee's community evangelist between January-October 2012.

Joe just loves to go fast. That's both a reflection of his status as a self-proclaimed 'racing game expert', and the fact he spends his days frantically freelancing for a bevy of games sites. For PocketGamer.biz, however, Joe brings his insight from previous job as a community manager at iOS developer Kwalee. He also has a crippling addiction to Skittles, but the sugar gets him through the day.