INFINITY BLADE AND

BEYONDTHE FUTURE OF MOBILE GAMES

GEREMY MUSTARD | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

INFINITY BLADE

• (Fun facts about IB in Korea… pending)

WHY MAKE PHONE

GAMES?

• Huge install base

• 2.2 billion dollar,

rapidly growing market

Global Mobile App Store Rankings(Ranking by revenue in millions of dollars)

2010 Rank Store

2009 Revenue

2010 Revenue

Annual Growth

1Apple App Store $769 $1,782 131.9%

2BlackBerry App World $36 $165 360.3%

3Nokia Ovi Store $13 $105 719.4%

4Google Android Market $11 $102 861.5%

Total $829 $2,154 160.2%

Source: IHS Screen Digest February 2011

WHY MAKE PHONE

GAMES?

• Huge install base

• 2.2 billion dollar, rapidly growing market

• Over 50% of that revenue comes from games

• The hardware is ready for games we like to make

THE HARDWARE

• Comparable to

last gen consoles

• Will surpass

current gen

consoles within 3

years

• Tons of memory

• Touch screens

MAKE IT PRETTY!

• Emphasis on close-up

characters

• Cinematic

presentation

• Uncluttered screen

• The world was our

story

MAKE IT FUN!

• Can play whole game with One Finger– Find ways to get input, then get that

finger out of the way

• Super short session core gameplay– Meaningful, fun, and progressive

every 2 minutes

• Original, Unique, Device Specific design– If your game would be great with a

controller, you are making the wrong game

• Easy to grasp, difficult to master– Truly skill based

CHARACTERS

• Lighting– Per-vertex specular looks

bad on characters

– Per-pixel specular from sum of diffuse RGB to save memory

– Spherical Harmonics from baked GI

• Low verts, HUGE texture maps– 3000 verts, 2048 textures

• Low bone count

• 2 weights per vert

• One draw call– Merged meshes and texture

atlas for hero character

ENVIRONMENT

• Keep draw calls down– Combine meshes that use the

same texture and shader

– Aggressive culling

• Custom painted cards for distance– Lower draw calls

– Simulate depth of field

• Colored lightmaps for distant meshes to simulate fog

• Delete unseen polygons– Fixed cameras allowed us to be

super aggressive

BAKED LIGHTING

• Global illumination

• Ambient occlusion

• Baked-in normal maps

• Custom painted details

LIGHTMAPS

BAKED

NORMALS

CUSTOM

MODULATE

LIGHTMAPS

BAKED

NORMALS

CUSTOM

MODULATE

OTHER OPTIMIZATIONS

• Getting around lack of precompiled shaders

• Next gen particle systems are not cheap– Automated flipbook texture creation from

expensive animated materials

• Precomputed visibility sets

• Considerations for different devices– Screen resolution vs memory

– Per-pixel rendering performance

SCALABILITY

• Plan ahead for hardware advances

• How easy was it to support iPad 2?– Content was ready (high res textures)

– Only changed 4 settings!• Set textures to use highest resolution mip-maps

• Turned on advanced character lighting

• Turned on MSAA

• Turned on 2nd CPU core

• Why so easy?– Scalable engine settings (must scale between mobile, console,

PC)

– Content built with near future in mind

Platforms in 2002

Consoles

PC Handheld

Mainstream Gaming

PlayStation 2

GameCube

Xbox

GameBoy

Platforms in 2012

Consoles

PC, Mac Native

Handheld

MMO

Mainstream Gaming

Xbox 360

Wii

PlayStation 3

Mobile/Phone

iPhone/iPad

Android

Nintendo 3DS

Sony NGPKinect XBLA

PSN

Web Gaming

Social Network Gaming

Facebook

Twitter

Browser Games

Windows Phone 7

DREAM BIG

• Modern mobile hardware + scalable

engines allows for easy cross-platform

development

• What kind of experiences will that allow?

DREAM REALLY BIG

2 BILLION consoles in

people’s pockets within 4

years!!!