Can I interest you in something extra? Building a game in an off-the-shelf engine is par for the course for today’s developers. But such engines also now offer services that go way beyond the core technology. MCV/DEVELOP talks to three developers about the additional services which helped make their titles a success
G Below: Outer Wilds was an extremely ambitious title for such a small team
ame engines, such as Unity and Unreal, have enabled a huge creative swell in the industry, enabling indie games to go well beyond what had been previously thought possible with small teams. Now though, the engine itself is going beyond, offering more and more services to such creators. Those services range from the likes of additional technical support for developers, plug-ins such as voice service or player management, or even cloud-based development options – allowing for fuss-free workflows in an increasingly remotefocused world. To look further into some of these options we spoke to developers about the additional services, in this instance from Unity, and how their games simply wouldn’t have thrived without them.
44 | MCV/DEVELOP October 2021
ALL THE ANSWERS Outer Wilds is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and well-received indie titles of recent years. Making the game was quite an undertaking and to achieve it the team at Mobius utilised on Unity’s professional services during development, we talk to Alex Beachum (Co-creative lead at Mobius), Loan Verneau (co-creative lead), and Wesley Martin (art director) about how crucial that became. The game is built on Unity – Why did you choose it for Outer Wilds? The earliest of the prototypes that would come together to become Outer Wilds came to be when Alex Beachum wanted to test if you could have a ship you could walk around in, then sit down in the cockpit and fly it from planet to planet. This proved surprisingly feasible to implement in Unity 4, the engine used for the class assignment this prototype was made for. When the full project was started at Mobius, prior experience with custom engines had shown the limitations of such a choice and the team’s familiarity with Unity made it a far more natural choice.
