﻿When you turn on a game, you see a bunch of stuff. Some of it you’ll recognize.
Studio logos, publisher names.
Other things you'll rightfully gloss over— like these
paragraphs of legal jargon. And then there are the things that make you go “hmm?”
Who is this terrible little octopus,
and why is he in all of my games? I was tired of wondering, so I figured it
out. Welcome to Polygon’s Comprehensive Guide to the first 15 seconds of every game.
[heart-pounding corporate-tinged Western trumpet]
[music winds to a halt]
Let’s start with the easy stuff. Typically, one of the first logos you’ll see is for a game’s engine.
In simple terms, an engine is a set of software tools that the devs used to make the game.
Some of them are tied to specific publishers or studios, like Capcom’s RE Engine,
Ubisoft’s Anvil, or DICE’s Frostbite. Or a developer might license a publisher-agnostic
engine like Unreal or Unity. A game’s engine can do a lot,
but it can’t do everything. And THAT is where the little logos come in.
You ever wonder how they get those pre-rendered movies into games? Probably not. You probably
just assumed they dragged an MOV file into halo.exe, and it just played. But it’s actually kind of
tricky. That game isn’t running Quicktime Player, and video files take up a lot of megabytes.
Bink is a proprietary video codec that solves those problems. Devs use it to crunch a big,
full-motion video sequence into a much smaller file — in this case a .bik or .b2k.
They stick that on the disk, and when it’s time to play the movie, those same Bink tools
reinterpret the files into something that looks close enough to the uncompressed original.
You just got Binked!
Compression isn’t just for video! Pretty much all data can be un-embiggened, which is great,
because nobody has unlimited hard drive space. That’s where THIS THING comes in.
A quick exercise: Take a look at this logo. You will now have five seconds to leave a comment
and let us know what you think it says.
[gentle, inquisitive plucking strings]
If you guessed Noodle, Woodle, Woolye, Wooole, or anything other than “Oodle” you're wrong.
It’s just Oodle. The octopus is silent. Oodle takes data, textures, and images and
makes them a whole lot smaller. Then when the game needs a chunk of that stuff,
Oodle decompresses it very, very quickly. Oodle also offers “network compression” —
the rapid un-embiggening of the individual packets of data that get sent back and forth when you’re
connected to an online game. In Surgeon Simulator 2 for example, there’s a lot of positional and
physics data that needs to stay n’sync across four networked players. If that data were raw,
it would clog up your internet pipes real fast, and there’d be shit everywhere.
The best thing about Oodle is that it’s an incredibly powerful, industry-standard tool
with an industry-worst logo. That means any studio that wants to use Oodle enters a devil’s bargain
where they gain incredible power, but they have to bear a mark of true evil. This shitty
fucking octopus is going to be on the splash screen of every game for the next 10 years.
Since the days of Counter-Strike, yelling and getting yelled at on voice comms has been a
cornerstone of online gaming.
"DOOR STUCK!!! DOOR STUCK!!!"
- But, not every studio has the resources or time to program
their own voice over IP comms system and keep the servers online, so Vivox fills that gap.
Vivox is the secret Skype that lets you scheme to kill and eat your crewmates in Dread Hunger,
and we love it. Criware is a set of
audiovisual tools for game development. The video side of the package is pretty much like Bink, except
it can play files that were encoded with .h264. That’s one ofthe most common file formats for digital
video distribution.
isn't that interesting?
You gotta tell me that's interesting because it's my job to know that stuff.
The sound suite lets devs create audio cues in an environment that anyone familiar with
digital audio production would be comfy in — but since it’s integrated with the gameplay engine,
stuff that happens in the game can alter how those cues play back. Devs can say “okay,
if this attack lands when Heihachi is in rage mode, play the normal cue, but with reverb:”
[big fart noise]
Tools like this are super important because they’re
a middle-ground between art teams and programmers.
You could definitely use code to change the playback properties of a sound file, but the
product is gonna be better overall if an audio expert can get in there and mess around.
Wwise is very similar, but it’s called Wwise. Wwwiise. Wwwwwwwwise.
If graphic design is your passion, you’re probably already a prisoner in the Adobe
Creative Suite. It is the very expensive standard toolbox for visual designers.
It’s been around for decades, and we can’t escape it.
For a game studio, creating tools that replicate its endless functions would be a nightmare,
and for the artist, learning those new tools would be a pain in the ass.
Enter Scaleform — a toolset that lets designers create menus and UI elements in Photoshop,
Illustrator and Flash, then imports their work into the game engine. The good news is
we all save some time. The bad news is there is no escape from the Creative Cloud.
Quixel Megascans is a super saiyan IV Getty Images that integrates directly with a game
engine. It’s got hyper-detailed 3D objects like stones and vegetation and furniture,
and lots and lots of textures, blemishes, and decals.
So let’s say a level artist needs a pile of rubble next to an old house. They can either go outside
and find the perfect reference and take photos and meticulously model dozens of unique lil chunks, or
they can just drag one over from Megascans. Scans and stock textures have been a time-saving
measure in games (and video production) for decades, but as AAA game worlds keep
getting more and more detailed, these libraries are becoming essential.
Simplygon helps 3D games run better. Every polygon rendered on a screen takes
up processing power, so devs are always looking to optimize. Simplygon makes that
easier. It can automatically turn a 3D object into a flat billboard (or collection of billboards),
it can simplify animations by removing ~unnecessary bones,~ it can aggregate loose
assets into single objects. It can even unrender parts of a 3D model that aren’t
visible to the player to save resources. That’s right. The back side of every house,
hill, and human could be hollow, and you’d never know.
I could be hollow right now.
And I wouldn't tell you.
Games have got a lot of fuckin’ trees in them, and trees are complicated. You need to
have an understanding of growth patterns, leaf coloration, limb flexibility, and more.
That’s why every single game studio in the world employs a full team of arborists.
no just kidding. They use Speedtree.
Speedtree is a suite of tools that lets level artists
build realistic, or not-very-realistic trees to their exact specifications —
and quickly. They can control shape, leaf count, texture, color, and a lot more. And
the trees aren’t just static objects. They can realistically react to the wind, or impacts.
Damn. You ever just look at a tree?
Truesky is like Speedtree, but for the sky.
Damn. You ever just look at a cloud?
Easy Anti-Cheat is a service that devs use to mitigate rule-breaking in online games. It scans for
cheaters with a handful of methods. Sometimes it’s as simple as identifying flagrant violations
of the game’s rules, like noticing if a player is moving way too fast, or stacking up an impossible
score. Other operations are clandestine. Easy Anti-Cheat has people sneaking around the dark
web, infiltrating illicit cheat dens so they can identify and block specific tools.
There are other services that do mostly the same thing, and have little fun logos, but nobody will ever
beat the mostly defunct PUNK BUSTER.
Havok models real-time physics and collision,
and it is the Best Thing to ever happen to video games. When you shoot a guy in Max Payne 2
and he flops over a pile of boxes and into a shelf of decorative thimbles,
that’s Havok. When you combat roll through a room full of chairs in Dark Souls, that is Havok.
I love this Havok, thank you for my life. Researching this video was a great reminder
of how much stuff there is to consider while making a game — from physics, to tree growth,
to clouds — and how utterly exhausting it would be to make it all from scratch.
So next time you're furiously mashing through the title cards of FortNite, take a moment to
appreciate the middleware heroes who make games possible, and remember the Wwise words of Ina
Garten. Sometimes, store bought is fine. So there’s your guide to the first
15 seconds of every game. Good luck with the stuff that comes after.
[thrilling Western music with a steady pulsing beat RETURNS]
[faint keyboard clacking]
[an eerie, droning sound............]
[dreadful menacing music, frantic keyboard slapping]
[WOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM]