IGNITE RACING GAME

Some tech info

We are a very small team, and the project time was very short too. 4 graphic artists worked on this game, but only (approx) 4 hours per day for 7 months. So: calculating with 8 hours per day this is only 2 artists for the whole 7 months! To better understand what and how we achieved, I will give you some more info about the graphics content, see below. We used our own game engine which was based on our previous game. It needed some developed of course. We had only 2 programmers, and a designer worked on the project for the last 3 months.

I think Blender is a great help to make good games with small teams in a short time. With it I think we managed to reach high level graphics, especially if we take the limited resources and short time we had into consideration.

We used Blender for level graphics. Most of the models were modeled in Blender, but some were coming from 3DS Max (exported from Max using .obj format). The levels use these objects by Blender link function, so the level editor was also Blender. We have a very good pipeline: everything is automated, we upload .blends to our server via SVN, and after 5-10 seconds(!) we can download the exported data from the SVN, and we can see the results in our engine. The pipeline is very fast because of our good programmers and because of the very short starting time of Blender. Of course when we export a level, we don't need to export the mesh data, only the transformations of the linked objects. By the way, the mesh exporting is also very fast.

The cars were modeled in 3DSMax and exported to our engine from Max. (Maybe one or two cars were modeled in Blender, and exported to Max.) (2 outsource graphics artists did the cars in 2 months time.)

We used Blender to create other graphics like HUD, GUI system, rendered intro videos, logo, etc. Our designer uses Blender too. He puts all gameplay-related objects in the level with it. He learned Blender basic functions in 4-5 hours.

The graphic content of the full game (approx info):

8 levels: region: 1000x1000 meters per level

2-3 track version per level

160 buildings

300 objects

50 small objects (decals etc.)

15 cars with 5 paints per car

Textures: everything has color, normal, specular, reflections maps

22 skyboxes with specified light setup

A typical level contains:

800 objects for the ground (road modules, decals etc.)

300 objects of buildings, walls, bigger objects

400 objects of middle size objects (plants, traffic signs, posters etc.)

100 objects for small things (decals etc.)

.blend fIle size: 700 Kbytes (using Blender compress function)