Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Taming the Beast: Managing
Complexity in Game Build Pipelines
Fernando Navarro
1.1 Introduction
It is not a secret. Game companies face fierce competition to attract gamer's
attention. Every holiday season, many products compete for the honor of being
played. As a consequence, games need to be bigger, nicer, even funnier! Their
plots need to be deeper and longer. Game scripts use many more levels, scenarios,
and quests. Engines struggle to squeeze all the computing power to render highly
detailed textures, models, and animations. Playing online and using downloaded
content is also a must. In short, games have become awfully complex.
From a technical point of view, each title requires more assets and increasingly
more complex relations among them. For artists to raise the quality level, they
need to rely on tools that allow quick iteration. Releasing a multiplatform game is
also the norm for many publishers.
Every aspect of the current generation of games proves more challenging for
the production pipeline. Traditional designs are no longer capable of handling
such pressure, and these not-so-old models do not scale well. New approaches are
required.
The importance of new solutions is so obvious that terms such as
content man-
agement
or
asset pipeline
have become frequent guests in the agenda of many
management meetings.
With this in mind, we are going to discuss different approaches that will be
helpful during the design, implementation, and refactoring of content processing and
asset build pipelines. Even if these notes do not represent a specific implementation,
they describe generic methods that can be used to reduce downtime and improve
eciency. Many of them are orthogonal and can be implemented independently
without requiring a full revamp of the system. These guidelines are a combination
3
