Battlebit: Interview with the Developers

Igor Vagun talked with the developers behind BATTLE BIT about the development process of Low-Poly Tactical Shooter with Hardcore elements.

Introduction

Hello, my name is Vilaskis Shalashev, I live in Belarus, and I am a level designer by trade.

I, along with my friend from Turkey, Okyanus Mutlu are developing a game named Battlebit on the Unity engine.

This is a long road that has its difficulties and interesting moments to which we were not ready.

BATTLEBIT is a low-poly tactical shooter with hardcore elements, including environment destruction, freelook, dragging the wounded, parkour, weapons customization, a…., where you will coordinate your actions on a server with 128 players and the outcome of our various game modes are highly influenced by teamwork at the intra-squad and inter-squad level.

You can destroy the environment, use it and interact with it.The very size of the maps areis” with “All of the trees and buildings are destructible, and the maps are from 64 km ^ 2 to 256 km ^ 2.

In the beginning

I was previously making mod maps for a game called Unturned and at some point, I have realized that I needed to do a stand-alone project where I can bring my imagination to life.

After some brainstorming, we chose to do a low poly style game rich in-game features and game mechanics.The choice of the engine fell immediately on Unity, as it is convenient for beginners and the company’s quick development and integration of newer and better tech gives a good strong and stable overall development routine.

Just do it!

We started development in June 2016. We made our roadmap and started actively developing the game.

Already by November 2016, we began to show our game to the Russian audience by spreading raw versions in the Zip archive.

Just a few months later in April 2017, we published the game on Steam GreenLight, and thanks to the wonderful support of our awesome community, we passed Steam GreenLight in just 9 days.

After some testing with the new fans in game, we came to the conclusion that we needed to rewrite the net code.

Three months later during stress tests, it was showing a stable support of up to 128 online players on one server and 40 units of vehicles and there still reserved power for future features.

Smart Ass optimization

When you develop for a long time on Unity, you begin to understand that Unity by default has a lot of methods for optimization.

We had to change bullet casings effects, we started with  a generally used approach to fully render casings, but found that we could teleport the casings to save CPU cycles.

The environment destruction also needed a special approach.

The wall has 20 fragments, which causes 20 draw calls. We combined 20 fragments into one mesh, and each fragment was given a bone, and each bone had a Rigidbody, which gives 1 culling in the end.  This resulted in significant savings that allowed us to move toward full destructibles.

Destruction system was added recently. Now you can go to the roof. Place a C4 at the top of the staircase and blow it up. The fragments will fall and crumble all that it beneath them. Now you have strong defensive position’s.

Environmental beautification

Big maps and low poly style demand good lighting and atmosphere to make the battlefield look realistic.

We had some consideration on the subject and settled on Deep Sky Haze.

Landscape creation and world assets

For landscape creation we use GAIA.

Asset modeling is done in Blender and texturing is realized with the help of paint.net

Inspiration is being drawn mostly from real-time locations and one of the maps is the area where I live. I have recreated the landscape and the surrounding villages and geography.

What does the future hold?

First, we will improve and polish the already working features including destruction, freelook, dragging the wounded, parkour, weapons customization.

As we feel comfortable through large scale testing all of these features once the open beta starts on 26.02.2018, we will listen to the requests and needs of our loved community and try to do well by them.

You can register on steam by the website and get a key to the beta. 

Interview conducted by Igor Vagun.