Silicon Studio is one of the biggest providers of hi-tech game development solutions in Japan. CEO and president of Silicon Studio Takehiko Terada was kind enough to talk with us about the company’s new tools.
Silicon Studio had a huge booth at GDC 2015 showing its lineup of graphics engines and tools for developers. This company is a well known middleware provider in Japan. Western audiences mostly know the company thanks to the Nintendo DS game Bravely Default and a retro action adventure called 3D Dot Game Heroes.
Silicon Studio is one of the biggest providers of high-tech game development solutions. This year the company showed a number of feature-rich products including Yebis 3, Mizuchi, and Paradox. CEO and president of Silicon Studio, Takehiko Terada, was kind enough to talk about the feature’s new tools in this exclusive interview with 80.lv.
About Silicon Studio
Our company is based in Tokyo Japan. We develop game tools and we develop video games. We’ve been working with all major Japanese companies: Square Enix, Bandai Namco Games. We also work with companies abroad like Ubisoft and so on. For a while we were mostly working with the Japanese market, and now we’re expanding overseas. At GDC we have a bigger booth than last year and we’re showing developers more technology.
When it comes to game development for Silicon Studio, the most popular game we probably have worked on was Bravely Default, which was published together with Square Enix and Nintendo. We also have a number of other games we’ve published in Japan and in the US.
The Open-source Power of Paradox
This time we have several tools to show at GDC. One of them is C# game engine Paradox. It’s great tech for mobile platforms. This is a complete game engine just like Unity, but it has a much better graphics technology. Our product is built around PBR (physically based rendering). We have a whole lot of cool features in Paradox and everyone can use them for free. Paradox is also totally open source. We’re going to continue to improve this engine and eventually at one point we will ask developers for a small charge, but at this moment it’s totally free. We invite everyone to use it and see what it can do.
Paradox is something in-between Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4. It’s both easy to use and it has a wide variety of features. We’re still working on the product and hope that someday we will be able to provide something that is feature-rich, easy to use, and cheap as well.
Virtual Posteffects in Yebis 3
Yebis 3 is an advanced post effect optical middleware. It simulates real cameras in the virtual environment and allows you to add different effects to the visual style of your game. For example, this tool can provide you with depth of field, lens flare, and different distortions. All of these features will help your game really stand out from the crowd.
The Colossal Mizuchi
Now, Mizuchi is our pride and glory. It’s a very advanced cutting-edge rendering system based on PBR. Instead of C#, this system is using C++. It’s a beautiful tool for those developers who want to target consoles and PCs. At our booth the demo was running on PlayStation 4 at 30 frames per second in real-time. Mizuchi allows you to create impressive 3D-graphics on the current generation of hardware. It’s almost CGI quality. Mizuchi is the best high-end rendering system. We’ve got incredible post effect systems. Our customers are using these technologies together with Unreal Engine 4 and other middleware.
Our solutions are contract-based. If you want our product you’ll need to sign a contract with us and after that we will send you the download link.