LogInNOG Studio's Fabien Roumazeilles has told us how the idea behind Menyr, the team's storytelling engine for playing TTRPGs, was first conceived, discussed the development process behind it, and explained why they chose Unreal Engine 5.
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Introduction
My name is Fabien, and I'm one of the co-owners of NOG. I started my career as a 2D Artist at Ubisoft, working on the Ghost Recon franchise. After that, I worked as a freelance Matte Painter in the cinema and entertainment industry for many years. Eventually, I became the Deputy Director of New3dge, a higher education school for concept art, game art, and VFX. It was there that I met Pierre, the founder of NOG, and later Vincent, who is now my other associate.
NOG was founded by Pierre in 2017, and specializes in outsourcing lighting work for various clients, including Ubisoft, Cyanide, and Dontnod. Over time, our team has grown from a one-man-army lighting outsourcing company to a fully remote team of 15 people handling multiple productions at the same time. We've worked on projects like Need for Speed Unbound, Kena: Bridge of Spirits, and the upcoming PAYDAY 3. We've also created digital sets for 1M+ subscribers YouTubers and recently released our first in-house project, Menyr.
NOG Studio
At NOG, we're proud to offer a diverse range of services that includes environment art, technical art, education, Unreal Engine, and of course, lighting. Our experience in both the game and VFX industries has proven to be a valuable asset, as both areas continue to push the boundaries of real-time rendering and image quality, respectively. As these two disciplines converge, we are continuously using the best of both worlds in our work. Thanks to our fully remote team, we've been able to adapt to the challenges of the 2020-2022 period and establish a streamlined online process that allows us to work with companies all over the world.
Menyr – The Storytelling Engine
Menyr is a storytelling engine that allows players to create worlds in seconds, and play directly in the program with your friends online. Great for playing TTRPGs, you will be able to change the mood of your scenes in real time, and adventure into undiscovered worlds with AAA graphics, all for free. From generating more than 60² miles of terrain, procedural multi-level dungeons and villages, to changing biomes on the fly, terraforming or changing the seasons with the press of a single button, Menyr will allow for a fully immersive RPG experience.
The idea for Menyr came when Pierre and I were playing some Dungeons and Dragons after work. As the game master, I always loved to maximize immersion: maps and YouTube 4K nature videos on the big TV, music, sound FX, encounter generators, you name it. After a few months of play and some unsuccessful attempts at playing online on popular virtual tabletops, two things came up: firstly, my prep time was too long, and sometimes the players would steamroll through my creations in unexpected ways. Secondly, my immersive material was limited by what I could find online, both in quantity and quality.
With our knowledge of photorealistic 3D environments, procedural tools and Unreal Engine, we could make our dream tool. The idea was born. The idea transformed into a pitch, then into hours of personal time on a prototype, and a year later, into an official NOG in-house project.
Choosing Unreal Engine to Develop the Toolkit
The tool was first designed to be a UE4 project, focused on immersion, creating procedural battle maps and available in VR. The scope was not as large as it is today, but something happened in the summer of 2020 that changed everything: Epic announced Unreal Engine 5. We knew switching from 4 to 5 would mean some work, but it went surprisingly smoothly. With features like Nanite and Lumen announced, we now could create a tool that could generate huge environments in a single click, real time weather and seasons, real time lighting on par with RTX quality, all in photo realistic visuals without compromise.
We decided to use Unreal Engine for the project because it is a platform that we use every day for our productions and have a strong mastery of. The resources and tools provided by Unreal allow a small studio like ours to undertake significant projects thanks to a comprehensive set of services offered. For example, Megascans provides us with realistic assets that help bring Menyr to life.
Unreal Engine is perfect for this procedural title because, with each technical need and issue we faced, Epic Games released an update that addressed the problem. Examples of these updates include Lumen for dynamic lighting, Nanite for optimizing imported assets, MetaHuman for character creation, and, most recently, the procedural content generation (PCG) technology for procedural generation. These features all contribute to bringing Menyr to life, showcasing the potential and versatility of Unreal Engine for this type of project.
Overall, there is a philosophical stance from Epic that resonates with us and makes for the perfect engine: free, accessible, powerful tools. We’re very excited to be giving back to the community with Menyr and become a part of the Unreal Engine ecosystem.
Generators Developed for Menyr
For Menyr, we are setting up two main categories of generators: natural biome generation (forest, desert, plains, mountains, etc.) and crafted environment generation (cities, dungeons, etc.). The process we use is data-driven. Since we may not have full control over the data, especially when the community imports their own resources, we cannot use algorithms that dictate where specific objects should be placed based on known characteristics. Instead, we've chosen an approach based on abstract data. The generation algorithms rely on a library of interchangeable asset categories. For example, when the kitchen generator wants to place a table, it doesn't point to table#XXX but instead selects from a database an asset that meets certain criteria, such as size: X;Y;Z, tag: kitchen, type: wooden table, and so on.
When the community wants to import an asset, it goes through a tagging process to populate the database. This way, the generators can use any available asset, whether it was imported by NOG or by the community.
The majority of our algorithms are hand-coded in C++. We are also using Voxel technology for the generation of destructible terrain. Since the announcement of Unreal Engine 5.2, we have been exploring the possibilities offered by the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) pipeline.
In summary, our generator system is designed to be versatile and adaptable, making use of a variety of tools and technologies to create diverse and engaging environments in Menyr.
Conclusion
The biggest challenge is to have a powerful tool with a good level of customizability while keeping the tool user friendly. This has to be true for both the creation part of Menyr, but also during play sessions. This is incredibly challenging, but we think we can pull it off and we've been making solid continuous progress so far! Our awesome community is also waiting at the gate to jump in the beta and ready to provide feedback so we can update the project accordingly.
For now, we are looking at a Beta release in June with limited features, and ramping up to a complete project a year later in 2024 with all announced features. The best way to support us is to share our project around. To simply follow the project's updates and be able to talk directly with the devs, the best is to join our Discord server where we already have a vibrant community!