With the advent of the Unity Top DOG (Developer of Online Games) Contest, developers at ThreeMelons redirected their attention long enough from their core business of Advergaming (a branch off the causal gaming circuit that focuses on using video games to communicate and generate relationships) to successfully release Tennis Star Cup (TSC). TSC initial inception began in August 07′ where a team of four worked diligently for a solid month piecing together a tech demo for their Top DOG entry. Their tech demo at the time had proven they were on the right track as their entry was short-listed for the TOP DOG award. Unfortunately that’s when the development for the game went into hiatus for a number of months. It wasn’t until early November that Shockwave showed interest and presented an offer to publish TSC on their highly popular online gaming website that the team picked up the title again in order to deliver a final build on January 4th, 08.
In this tech review I spoke with Lead Developer at ThreeMelons Joaqu n Estrag about his thought process and the development behind TSC.
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No-Man’s Land
When creating a well known title such as Tennis, players like myself expect functional and intuitive controls that are easy to pick up and play without going through extensive instructions, and of course all of this must be anchored with fun gameplay. Fortunately these are definitely two of the most enjoyable aspects; the controls were extremely well thought out and tightly integrated. By simply moving and gesturing with a mouse I was able to move my character, perform lobs, topspins, dropshots and even trickshots quite easily and what made this better was the fact that all of these complex actions were done with one hand! Speaking with Joaqu n Estrag regarding the controls he had this to say;
“We had just gotten a Wii at the office, and Wii Tennis blew us away. We wanted to transport that experience to an online game, but we also wanted to give the player a sense of actually controlling more precisely the direction of the ball. Giving the player the ability to “draw” the shots introduced a great depth to the control system.”
Having said that, for the team the implementation of the control scheme was the single most important aspect of the game, knowing that the success of the game balanced on proper integration they sought out a team of beta testers whom provided important feedback giving the developers insight on issues that prevented the intuitiveness that they sought. And even though the information provided by the beta testers proved vital to the completion of the game, there was always room for improvement as Joaqu n states;
“On one hand, I think we failed a little in making it instantly accessible the way Wii Tennis is, without losing the added depth; it is still a hard game the first time you pick it up, and it takes a little effort to get the hang of it, which could turn away some players.”
Personally I found the little effort needed to become acquainted with the way TSC is played shouldn’t hinder its appeal to the causal crowd, in fact the developers themselves proclaimed their happiness with their efforts and believed they succeeded in providing a more involved approach to online tennis.
Gaining the advantage
TSC was created solely for an online experience, and because of this the team at Three Melons realized their goals with Unity, a powerful off the shelf 3D engine. They began work with version 1.6.2 of the engine, and over that time Unity receive an update to version 2.0 and while most developers would find it more than a minor annoyance to switch a 3rd party product throughout the development cycle of a game, it wasn’t the case here, the team upgraded to version 2.0 of the engine all the while not skipping a beat in development, in fact they capitalized on some of the newly integrated features.
Aside from the engine itself, Autodesk Maya was used for all modeling and animation, the industry standard Photoshop was used for the creation of the textures and the GUI for the game.
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TSC was created on Core2Duo Mac book Pro’s for main development and Athlon 64bit equipped machines with support from NVIDIA 7800 GPUs, they were also outfitted with 2gb of system RAM for testing and other small tasks. Though these are relatively modest machines by today’s standards it didn’t hamper their development in the least.
When asked about the use of the Unity engine, Joaqu n had this to say;
“We used Unity, and I must say it’s the best engine I’ve used. It’s very easy to learn, and very powerful. I’ve worked with a couple of similarly-priced 3D engines in the past, and there’s truly no comparison to be made.
The prototyping is direct and with an extremely quick turn-around. In TSC, we had a working (although very primitive) prototype within a week of starting.”
This is great, because the last thing you need as a developer is to have software impede your development.
The continually maturing engine has indeed cut its teeth quite awhile ago, and with the advent of the newly released 2.0 build, they are indeed upping the ante for the competition.
Inside-out
Ok so TSC may not be as robust as your Top Spins or Virtua Tennis currently available, but as a free web based tennis game TSC is at the top of its game.
Visually the game displays very functional assets and textures, and if you were to break them down you will find that the character models sport a very modest 2000 tris each with texture sizes of 512 x 512, the environments on the other hand weren’t much larger than the characters themselves, clocking in at 3000 tris and utilizing a 1024 texture map. And now that I think of it TSC would make a compelling full fledged handheld, live or PSN title. *nudge* *nudge*
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When it came to the A.I. the first match appeared as if my opponent was a tad on the dim side, but that impression was soon put to rest as I rose through the tournament, the computer counterparts really began to step up their game by keeping me busy from end to end with properly placed shots and better knowledge of where the ball will lie once it’s returned. Not sure if this was the result from complex A.I. routines or simplified states I questioned Joaqu n regarding this and he had this to say;
“We have a fairly simple state machine controlling the actions of the player class. But the important part is a set of about a dozen variables that dictate the behavior of the AI player, and determines its difficulty. These variables go from running speed to reaction time to shot quality (average and variance), etc.”
Technically, the team had no real issues to overcome, every roadblock that they ventured into was just based on unfamiliarity with the way the engine worked with 3D assets. Coding was a relatively easy task once they ironed out precisely what was needed to make the game cohesive.
With only a four person team, the duties were divided across the board equally, for each area of production one member was responsible for character modeling and animation, environments, programming and finally design. Within the last couple of months of development, the team dispersed to continue on other projects as one remaining member tied up any loose ends that may be evident.
Down the line
As a quick web based title, TSC could’ve indeed be vastly improved on, but given the development time they were of course features that had to be left on the cutting room floor. Some examples of omitted features would’ve been characters that had precise stats for each, showing certain strengths, weaknesses or even play styles. Another feature that had to be omitted early despite a working proof of concept was of course multi-player. The team initially had a proof of concept working were two players could play each other remotely, but unfortunately Shockwave was unable to support multi-player for the unity engine at the time of release, guaranteeing its inevitable omission from production, however all wasn’t lost since this gave the team extended time to focus more on the single player experience.
Looking down the road ThreeMelons has plans for expanding the world of TSC, but for now they’re just plans as stated by Joaqu n;
“Yes, there are always plans. The most immediate would be to continue the development of the multiplayer element.
But for now they are only plans. Right now we’re just enjoying the game being release and doing quite well, and generally positive reactions.”
Their main goal was to get the word out to the general public about the versatility of the Unity engine which they have essentially done. As of writing TSC is currently enjoyed by hundreds of players daily through Shockwave’s portal site.
With the successful launch of TSC, ThreeMelons will now begin to broaden their horizons from their core business and expertise of Advergaming.
Tito A. Belgrave
Related links:
Tennis Star Cup
ThreeMelons
Unity
