Ron de Feijter
Interior Night
After completing his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2006, Ron moved from the scientific community into the game development community, initially at Playlogic in The Netherlands. In 2010 he moved to London to start work for PlayStation's London Studio and worked his way up to Principal Programmer. He joined Interior Night as Technical Director from the moment the company was formed in 2017 and has been responsible for all technical aspects of the studio and their games ever since.
Ron de Feijter is speaking at the following session/s
Programming for ‘As Dusk Falls’: Using Unity Differently
In the summer of 2022 Interior Night released its first title, the branching narrative game 'As Dusk Falls'. Developed in Unity, this game posed some interesting engineering challenges due to its very nature. Think for instance of its instantly recognizable and distinct art-style using 2D characters placed in 3D environments. These character images are created by 2D artists based on stills from video shoots of actors playing out the story, which allowed us to capture the emotion of the actor’s performance. This, however, only works if these 2D and 3D elements are merged together perfectly. Or what about the design requirement to have no loading screens whatsoever during an entire episode.
This talk will focus on how As Dusk Falls was realised by creating a range of bespoke Unity extensions and pipelines as well as a number of supporting tools around that. It will discuss the way the game was constructed in Unity, how content creators were able to navigate through the game both at design and runtime and how the tools were made to enable them to work effectively. As a specific example it will examine the character pipeline combining 2D character images with 3D environments by describing the custom tooling created in Unity to work with these character images, the bespoke tools implemented to generate the required content at the video shoots, the automated processes happening both inside and outside Unity to support the content creators, and many more elements that tied into this pipeline. Furthermore, this talk will also highlight some additional (Unity) tools and integrations implemented to facilitate debugging, performance measurements, reviews and iteration, and providing production with insights into the state of development.
Session Takeaway
- How to build a branching narrative game in Unity
- How to organise a narrative game to hide content loading
- How to create an art style that combines 2D and 3D elements
- Examples of how to create custom UI and integrations for Unity to streamline the workflow for content creators
- Examples of how to combine tools inside and outside Unity to create bespoke pipelines
- Examples of how to use automated processes to free up development time
Session speakers
