INFINITY BLADE AND
BEYOND
THE FUTURE OF MOBILE GAMES
GEREMY MUSTARD | TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

INFINITY BLADE
• (Fun facts about IB in Korea… pending)

WHY MAKE PHONE
GAMES?
• Huge install base
• 2.2 billion dollar,
rapidly growing market

Global Mobile App Store
Rankings
(Ranking by revenue in millions of dollars)
2010
Rank Store
2009
Revenue
2010
Revenue
Annual
Growth
1Apple App Store $769 $1,782 131.9%
2BlackBerry App World $36 $165 360.3%
3Nokia Ovi Store $13 $105 719.4%
4Google Android Market $11 $102 861.5%
Total $829 $2,154 160.2%
Source: IHS Screen Digest February 2011

WHY MAKE PHONE
GAMES?
• Huge install base
• 2.2 billion dollar,
rapidly growing market
• Over 50% of that
revenue comes from
games
• The hardware is ready
for games we like to
make

THE HARDWARE
• Comparable to
last gen consoles
• Will surpass
current gen
consoles within 3
years
• Tons of memory
• Touch screens

MAKE IT PRETTY!
• Emphasis on close-up
characters
• Cinematic
presentation
• Uncluttered screen
• The world was our
story

MAKE IT FUN!
• Can play whole game with One
Finger
– Find ways to get input, then get that
finger out of the way
• Super short session core gameplay
– Meaningful, fun, and progressive
every 2 minutes
• Original, Unique, Device Specific
design
– If your game would be great with a
controller, you are making the wrong
game
• Easy to grasp, difficult to master
– Truly skill based

CHARACTERS
• Lighting
– Per-vertex specular looks
bad on characters
– Per-pixel specular from sum
of diffuse RGB to save
memory
– Spherical Harmonics from
baked GI
• Low verts, HUGE texture
maps
– 3000 verts, 2048 textures
• Low bone count
• 2 weights per vert
• One draw call
– Merged meshes and texture
atlas for hero character

ENVIRONMENT
• Keep draw calls down
– Combine meshes that use the
same texture and shader
– Aggressive culling
• Custom painted cards for
distance
– Lower draw calls
– Simulate depth of field
• Colored lightmaps for distant
meshes to simulate fog
• Delete unseen polygons
– Fixed cameras allowed us to be
super aggressive

BAKED LIGHTING
• Global illumination
• Ambient occlusion
• Baked-in normal maps
• Custom painted details

LIGHTMAPS

BAKED

CUSTOM

LIGHTMAPS

BAKED

CUSTOM

OTHER OPTIMIZATIONS
• Getting around lack of precompiled shaders
• Next gen particle systems are not cheap
– Automated flipbook texture creation from
expensive animated materials
• Precomputed visibility sets
• Considerations for different devices
– Screen resolution vs memory
– Per-pixel rendering performance

SCALABILITY
• Plan ahead for hardware advances
• How easy was it to support iPad 2?
– Content was ready (high res textures)
– Only changed 4 settings!
• Set textures to use highest resolution mip-maps
• Turned on advanced character lighting
• Turned on MSAA
• Turned on 2nd CPU core
• Why so easy?
– Scalable engine settings (must scale between mobile, console,
PC)
– Content built with near future in mind

Platforms in 2002
Consoles
PC Handheld
Mainstream Gaming
PlayStation 2
GameCube
Xbox
GameBoy

Platforms in 2012
Consoles
PC, Mac Native
Handheld
MMO
Mainstream
Gaming
Xbox 360
Wii
PlayStation 3
Mobile/Phone
iPhone/iPad
Android
Nintendo 3DS
Sony NGPKinect XBLA
PSN
Web Gaming
Social Network
Gaming
Faceboo
k
Twitter
Browser Games
Windows Phone 7

DREAM BIG
• Modern mobile hardware + scalable
engines allows for easy cross-platform
development
• What kind of experiences will that allow?

DREAM REALLY BIG
2 BILLION consoles in
people’s pockets within 4
years!!!