Interview with Epic Games about the development of Battle Breakers

Alexander Semenov, Senior Editor App2Top.ru : Epic Games has announced a mobile game – Battle Breakers. The new game does not look like a demonstration of Unreal’s technical capabilities, as was partly the case with Infinity Blade. What is the new project for the company?

Battle Breakers Team: The Battle Breakers game was born from an idea that a small team came up with as part of an internal game jam. We liked the root gameplay so much that we wanted to bring the idea to a full-fledged mobile game.

Both the style [of work] and the approach [to the development] of Battle Breakers turned out to be different from what people usually expect from Epic.

When I asked this question, I was referring to the policy you recently announced. You have announced that you have 6 projects in development at once. Considering that the company has never worked on such a number of projects at once before, it is interesting to find out what prompted the company to change the format of work. And what is the place of Battle Breakers in the new strategy of the company?

As a publisher, it is important for us to have a line of different games on multiple platforms. Battle Breakers is our first experience of a global edition of the game on two major mobile platforms at once. We will use this experience for educational purposes when launching the next games.

How long has he been working on the game and with what composition?

This is a very compact team. Most of the work was done last year (2016). Some part was made a little earlier in order to launch the game into full production.

Compact is a stretchable concept. For indie, it’s one or three people, for Blizzard, in the case of the first Heathstone developments, it was 12 people.

The initial concept, which then grew into Battle Breakers, started with a team of 3 employees. Later, the staff grew to 20 people when we focused on development and started the publication procedure.

And, by the way, once the conversation went about the team. How is the development process on the game lined up now? Do you have a dedicated team, where there are artists and programmers at once, or is there, roughly speaking, a management that throws tasks to a common pool of developers?

As a rule, teams work independently of each other: we have a Paragon team, we have a Fortnite team, and so on. However, there are areas where we share resources between projects if necessary.

Battle Breakers is a card battler. Today, this genre is going through a bad time. He was at the pinnacle of success in mobile a few years ago, when everyone was talking about Rage of Bahamut and Puzzle & Dragons, but today he already looks somewhat archaic. Why did you decide to take up this genre?

Battle Breakers is not a battler, but a turn–based strategic role-playing game in which you collect and develop hundreds of heroes to create a dream team. The latter will have to fight monsters and big bosses.

The team was inspired by many genres and games and was happy to take up the style of gameplay that they love and direct it in a different direction.

We are all used to the fact that when it comes to projects from Epic Games, then you should expect complex three-dimensional graphics from the game. Battle Breakers is also an exceptional project for the company, because, as far as one can understand, it is a two-dimensional project with characters animated in Spine (at least it gives the impression). Tell us about the technologies used in the game. What new things had to be implemented in Unreal 4 to implement the game?

Unreal Engine 4 is capable of producing a great picture on mobile devices – that’s for sure. Games like Blade II and Lineage are an example. As for Battle Breakers, here we wanted to take up styling. All the art, not counting FX, was initially two-dimensional, and then transferred to 3D, where a mask, bones were added to each drawing, and then animated. This is an unusual mix of 2D and 3D. We really like the result.

And the bones were drawn using the basic functionality?

Battle Breakers characters were created using standard tools like Photoshop and Maya. If we talk about models, then they were specifically made using the three-dimensional Photoshop toolkit, which can take a layer and squeeze out a three-dimensional grid. Then the grid is exported from Photoshop to Maya, where standard dice and weight values are attached to it.

Unreal Engine gives a cool picture, but there is a performance issue. It is still a problem of the engine on mobile. How relevant is it for two-dimensional projects? And what about the size of the distribution, how much has it been reduced to?

UE4 will always be focused on creating high-end, AAA images, but we are aware that this topic worries many. At the same time, we want developers to be able to create projects that would be suitable for many types of devices. Since we are not only an engine developer, but also a game developer, our employees face the same problems and have the same concerns as our licensees. Thanks to this, we can solve them not only within the framework of specific projects, but also in the whole engine. The same is true for Battle Breakers, since the project is being developed for iOS and Android devices – not only for powerful and new ones, but for a wide range of devices of various performance.

Since we’re talking about graphics, let’s talk about the visual style of the project. In the announcement, you called it 80’s Saturday morning cartoons. From the outside, it is read more in the spirit of Americanized anime. How would you describe him?

Anime, manga and morning cartoons of the 80s, as well as toys of that time – all influenced the game style. Both the world and the characters were created in such a way as to bring back nostalgia for them.

Supercell, talking about the style of the Clash series, said that she found it by combining the approach of Pixar and Street Fighter. Were there any main sources of inspiration for your artists? After all, as we know, there were a lot of cartoons in the 80s.

The source of inspiration is the atmosphere of that era, not some separate series. But, obviously, we drew ideas, including from such series as Power Rangers and G.I. Joe, where you have at your disposal a large team of colorful heroes and monsters working together. The fact that they have become the main source of our inspiration can be understood even by the title song, which turns on when the game is first launched.

I see. Thanks for the interview.