(Continued from BP4)

Now, when it comes to Boom Co's animation, we were gunning for a mix of the anime look, with more 3D added to it using lighting techniques at the shader level.

I'm a big fan of anime and all of our characters will be sticking to the anime look, but I feel that in the gameplay, we should take advantage of the greater depth that 3D can provide.

[ Copyright © Cowboy Bebop ] 

This entails a few challenges.

The target of the look is relatively simple to decide. However, like all games, the hard part is always the amount of content that needs to be done. In our process, establishing a quick pipeline is a top priority.

With a game like Boom Company with its focus on battling spacecraft, character animations will be much fewer and spaced out. We do, however, need a lot of supplemental-type of animations, from rotating asteroids to vibrating energy sources.

If we did all the animations in the CPU (where it can probably only handle up to a couple thousand animation sources at most) the game will be slowed to a crawl.

So we have to offload those simple ones to the GPU by running it on the shader. Now we can have asteroid fields with tens of thousands of asteroids without losing a single FPS.

[ Did you say ASTEROIDS?! ]

This animation capacity enables us to bring to life all the ships, weaponry, environmental effects and more with the look and feel that we envisioned for the Boom Company world.

Good thing too, 'cause it's a crazy one. /B