Fortnite Effect still ripples through the game industry.

Wildlife, a mobile gaming startup, raised $120 million in a Series B funding round that gave it a $3 billion post-money valuation.

Is this the 'secret sauce'? battle royal, I mean..look at the art style, the mechanics, the game play.
Clean, simple, fast...is this, the next gen in mobile?
or
Is realism on mobile...dead?

Either way, don't give up, when your feeling like you won't succeed...think of how a couple of brothers, new game developers, had a vision, worked long and hard and created 3 billion dollars worth of wealth...doing what they love.

It cheered me up.
Patrick

perspective:
Unity, now valued at $6B, raising up to $525M | TechCrunch
techcrunch.com › 2019/07/25

 

I wouldn't look to stories like this for motivation. Dig a deep hole going the wrong direction that way.

I stick with realistic graphics for now only because there is more ready-made content available that I can use in my projects in that style. If I am paying artist to make content from scratch, no way in hell I'd shell out for realistic graphics. Simply takes too much time.

You have to consider inefficiencies in the workers. Every person, and especially those with less years experience, will spend a certain amount of time wasting time fruitlessly. Not on purpose of course, just normal human error.

Say you hire enviro artist to make your trees. He might spend 10 hours fussing over individual leaf cards. Something that could have been done perfectly fine in 20 minutes.

With realistic graphics there is more layers of stuff you need, which means more opportunity for human error to amplify time. In other words, you giving people more opportunity waste time on superfluous S***.

Maybe sounds a bit harsh but I think if you looking at what others are doing and asking, "is this what I should do?" you are already too far behind. You need to be breaking ground somewhere others havent already.

Only other path I can see is make similar product cheaper. But who the hell wants to do that.

I say avoid the feeding frenzy. Find your own niche. Otherwise its really just a crap shoot. If you need money right now going to be easier outside of games.

 

Spam?

 

Looks like it. That "wildlife" company is apparently not doing that great if they need to shamelessly spam their ads in random online forums.

 

OP has nearly 600 posts over the years. That's a quality sleeping spam bot.
No, he's not spamming. He's just posting media for context.

 

It costs more to make a photo-realistic game than a cartoon one. Unless the executive of a mobile game studio is a "true gamer", visual fidelity is the corner that logically gets the cut, as unless you are the big players in the industry, mobile game profit margin is very slim.

 

Realism don't matter that much with good trained and skill artists, look at those speed painting video, or the chineese copist that makes copy of old master artist in only 3 hours.

Cartoon is only faster when you don't have enough skills, or hasn't been trained properly to be efficient.

Those cartoon in the video are very well produced in 2D form. The 3D part is overtly simplified and they basically leverage the 2D illustration to prime a sleeker mental image.

ALSO BATTLE ROYAL ISN'T AN INVENTION OF FORTNITE, BLAME THE HUNGER GAMES FOR REVITALIZING THE IDEA IN GAME, but you had a successful japanese movie to set the name, then a bunch of minecraft mods to set the video game genre, then dayz for refining the mechanics, PUBG for tightening it and making it mainstream, then fortnite for accidentally erasing everybody's contribution while still adding a key element of build fight ...

 

If you're creating a game with the expectation that it will last many years the last thing you want to do is choose an artstyle that will require significant upkeep to remain relevant. Realism ages poorly while cartoons age gracefully. World of Warcraft is a great example of this with even the oldest areas still looking beautiful.

 

Is that what you do...a spam detective? looking out for the greater good? I'd say your a troll.

 

Lets keep the tone light and on topic, they were right to call out spam if they believed it was a spam post - we get a ton of it here. And someone corrected them already. Issue is already put to bed and discussion that is relevant is already happening - dont start an argument in your own thread.

 

I'm not a bot, i sell some on the unity store to prove that and i dont have much post in the unity forums
I think sometimes some just get in forums and later on goes somewhere else, and yeah some few posts members are bots, annoying one but not all of them

 

Is this a joke? It's like someone finds out that Brad Pitt gets 10,000 love letters a day, so they decide being a normal guy = dead.

Actually, you're looking at the top end of a perfectly healthy industry. If you can't satisfy the 20,000 people who will buy a good game in your favorite genre (giving you plenty of money in the process), what will you do with the billion customers who want to play whatever is trending in the rest of the world?

 

Couldn't have put it better myself.

 

In order to prove you are not a bot, click on images that have a car in it.

 

PBR have aged very well though. You can take your unity 5 game and migrate it to 2019 or 2020 HDRP pipeline and it will look like a 2020 game.

 

PBR is only four years old.

 

pbr isn't an art style either

 

Personally, I don't have any problem playing realistic games from around 2011 onward. Sure they aren't as pretty as Cyberpunk, but they aren't head-spinning ugly either.

Realism isn't going anywhere. Fortnite is just designed to run on as many devices as possible, so everything is compressed, including the art detail. I'm sure that's a big part of why this new wonder child got 120 million.

Just remember that the kind of people who are playing realistic RPGs and such are not generally interested in piddling around on a mobile phone trying to level up and beat their friends. Fortnite is a specific type of game for a specific type of audience. So is Candy Crush. They are for kids to play on their way to school. And they pose no risk to realism in games.

 

I play ravenshield from 2003, so it's an invalid statement that realistic games don't age well.

 

But it's the standard used when creating realistic styled games since it came out.

Our game looks alot better today than it did in 2016 and we are even still on built in.

Imagine if it was on HDRP and that it was used to its fully.

Regardless realistic games age well, half life 2, Doom 3, ravenshield, crysis, etc, etc

 

Pbr is just a method to unify lighting and material. Artistically the main contribution was energy conservation, as it makes a same material behave similarly in any light context, instead of fiddling around whenever you make a night sequence with material designed for daylight.

Old game could look like pbr based game, if you had infinite time onto artists tinkering endlessly every assets for every light rig, multiplying material and shader, and having expensive trip to reference location and set. Pbr cut the fat and makes production happy by rationalizing light.

That mean it's not just for realistic game, the insight propagated to other techniques like cell shading thanks to the knowledge gained. In fact a lot of toon shader are build on top of pbr lighting to keep the coherence. Honkai impact 3 have stunning anime style 3d, it's based on a pbr base.

And most modern games look hood today because we learned from the past and evolved techniques and sophistication of style. The ds is technically close to the 64, game are much better modeled and take better adventage if hardware, just look in general at early games of a hardware iteration vs the latter game at the end. That's not specific to realistic game.

 

Personally I think toon shaders coupled with PBR looks weird, but that's just my opinion. Since PBR by nature looks realistic and toon shaders do not they clash. Tell tale games are doing this alot. Not a personal favorite

Edit: mainly the physical correct specularity that clashes.

 

That's only the bad one, zelda botw is pbr based the toon shading is done as post process on top if it.

Like i said it's a techniques and knowledge, not an aesthetic and there is many way to use it. Just because it doesn't looks like it dies not mean it's not it.

 

Haven't played that title, I have played some Mario Odessy and I think some PBR materials look malplaced there too.

 

Battle Royale genre is still very hot, like the recent released title "Fall Guys" (which is a Unity game), graphics are simple but cute, also anime style

That reminds me that Anime style (both western comic feel like Fortnite and east manga feel) are very much on the rise in global market, so can Unity please provide some official-supported shader solution on this topic?

Like an URP/HDRP shader template that focus on Anime Style
which can easily configured/tweaked by developer to realize this art style quickly

There are several similar assets in the store, but I would like to see if it can be an official feature
I've checked Unreal asset store and found very few anime shader assets there. as far as I know there are a couple of anime-style games developed using Unreal but most of them using studio's in-house solution for shading

I would like Unity to be a NO.1 choice for anime-style game across all platforms, it's another battlefield, different than realistic graphic

But can easily attract new-coming and young developers (which grow up with anime industry)

After all we have Unity-chan as mascot for many years before, and that might need an update

 

It's technically official
https://unity-chan.com/download/releaseNote.php?id=UTS2_0&lang=en

 

Thank you neo, new Unity-chan effects are great, yet I would say still have plenty room to improve,

on mobile I use anime shader from this asset creator (their shader seems more performant and simpler)
https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/7986

Unity-chan's HDRP shader seems less impressive, considering last year there is this Unity HDRP demo by an independent studio:

(too bad this is their in-house solution so no access to shader code)

I wish Unity can someday achieve something similar to this effect and present as an HDRP/URP preset, and then it will become King of anime creation engine, anime-fan/creators all over the world will rush to our engine and start creating!

 

They made a presentation that spills all teh bean, Unity chan can do as much, it's the artist that made teh difference.

 

You mean in games or what? Because PBR as a concept has been around since the 80s, with multiple papers published on it. Disney have been doing PBR or a form of it for yonks as well in their rendering such as with (some) pixar stuff.

A lot of the stuff comes from a 1997 paper, which the guys in 2014 paper built on top of and coined PBR at that point (but it was already a thing just not really named and popular).

Im sure I have just misfollowed somewhere, so ignore me if it just sounds like I am being a fancy-pants

 

Fornite and western comic feel isn't an anime style

ALthough to be honest, Disney Style and Anime Style can be very similar visually at times.

It is a valid argument, they start looking blurry and dated very quickly.

See Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of Elusive Age.
Also see movies by Pixar. They're using PBR rendering, pretty much.

 

They dont look more dated than a toony game from same era. A good realistic game then is a good realistic game now.
So its just not valid that a realistic game age less good than a toony game.

Also a toony game looks dated on release

 

In Unity its been around since Uinity 5. First game I played with it I think was BF4 but I can be wrong

 

Why don't you take a look at Call of Duty 1 footage or something and then compare it with Shin Megami Tensei: NOcturne.

They do look more dated than toony games of the same era. Even half life did not age well, which is surprising, as I can remember how astonished I felt when you first launched the game and could pretty much count pores on Gman's face.

The point is Realism is significantly more demanding, and requires continuous investment, otherwise something will quickly stand out. Like not using PBR, not having bumpmapping, not having enough facial morphs, and so on. This is something you IMMEDIATELY notice.

Non-photorealistic game does not require continuous investment, and basically the only issue you get is that outlines will be a tiny bit rougher than what you're used to. The rest will be mostly still acceptable.

 

I agree half life 1 didn't age that well, but hlf life 2 is just a few years younger and have aged very well. I don't think anyone will argue its easier todo a lowpoly or Toony game, but it's not the same thing as age well.

Also if you don't have an artist it's much easier getting a consistent feel with realistic assets.

edit:

Yes, I ment if you kept to high quality PBR assets you are future safe artlest for a long time. Engines evolve, but PBR assets can move along with the changes.

 

No, half life 2 looks dated currently. The main issue is that it is using non-pbr lighting, which is very noticeable, and texture details are low.

Making "Toony" game is harder, if you're taking the style seriously.

And it ages better, simply because you do not have a lot of texture details to begin with. Insufficient texture detail and complex shapes contribute to the game looking "old". Because non-photorealistic rendering does not focus on that, they're less suspectible to loss of fidelity.

My impression is that you have two years top before your asset starts looking "low resolution".

There's a limit to this, of course, and at some point we'll reach movie resolution, where it will be possible to examine every matchstick under microscope, but currently we aren't there.

Another issue is that if you cannot produce high resolution assets very quickly, you'll end up reusing, and that will cause negative impact, basically creating an equivalent of rpgmaker feeling in high fidelity games. This currently happens basically with every game that uses daz models. They have a "low quality" feeling to them even though the models can be high resolution.

 

This is one of the assets in our game. It was created five years ago for Unity 5. Its not dated, and will not be for a foreseeable future.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DvLXn

edit: if you look at every single asset one by one without context, yes half life 2 looks dated. When you play the game it does not.

 

Try that model on a wii game, or on the n64.

Also it's not organic shape and material

 

Here is a organic model from our game, also 5 years old

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XdEAa

edit: it would might have some more polys today, but it hasn't aged bad

 

You're depicting a single object, while what matters is EVERYTHING in your game together.
Because that's what gives that "dated feeling".

 

No it, its the complete opposite. Half Life 2 again, if you look on every single asset you can see its low res and dated. But in game when all comes together is just a good looking and fun game.

 

I think it looks like kaka and its the opposite of fun. Prove me wrong.

 

Have you, uh, played Half Life 2 recently? Why don't you fire it up and take a look...

Spoiler

G man's eye:


Npc detail:



Environment quality:

It simply doesn't work the way you insist it does. "All of it together", gives, currently, a dated feeling. It almost feels like Quake 2 now. Almost.

Texture resolution, polygonal density, the way models are animated, and the lighting. The game is still fun, yes.

But it looks dated. Very.

--------------------

Games that utilize sprites, or games that do not utilize texture filtration, age better than anything that tries to go for realism, and games that utilize cartoon visuals age almost as well as sprites.

The reason for that is when someone adds a new "more realistic" effect, you get used to it being there, and when you face a game where this thing isn't present, the game without that feature looks old. I suppose that when a game isn't "real" to begin with, there's no default expectation, and no dated feeling in the future as a result.

For example, the issue with half life 2 is that environments barely have any interactive lighting and almost appear unlit (until you get the flashlight). The floor shines with environmental HDR maps, but, nothing uses PBR, meaning you dont' see any metallic shine anywhere. It has a brushed plastic feeling, almost gouroad. The texture detail low, and issues with facial animations are glaringly obvious, as it does not match modern standard.

That's pretty much the fate of all visually-oriented works. Something new will appear, raise bar higher, your game will not have matching feature, and it will look dated.

 

I think it has aged well thanks to excellent level and environment design. Offocurse it doesn't look as good as modern games. That's not the point.

Silent hill 2 is another game that has aged well.

But yes, PBR has raised the bar even further and that's also my point, PBR realistic games will age even better.

 

Also to answer OP, it is an artifact of fortnight, it's an artifact of team fortress 2 putting stylized graphics on the map for AAA games, overwatch predate fortnite too.