Girish Nohwar: Project

This is my hobby project which I work on in my free time, I try to translate my love for motorcycles into this piece of software. Apart from expressing this love I try to push my technical and artistic skills here. Unfortunately, I stopped getting much of that free time just months into the development. Still here are few things I achieved and am really proud of.

//Technical Highlights:

1. PROCEDURAL AUDIO GENERATION FOR ENGINES

I believe most motorcycle enthusiasts would agree with me on this that the most beautiful part about their motorcycle is the sound it makes. It's music to our ears. So naturally my utmost focus was getting the sounds right. Downloading few clips from internet and playing them on loop wouldn't cut it. So I just build an audio generation tool to help myself. Make waveforms, overlap them like a real engine's cylinder configuration. The one bike that is in the game might not sound the most beautiful thing to you, because one, it's tuned to my personal taste. Second, It was supposed to be an entry level bike, more obnoxious ones were supposed to come later. But the important thing is, it's responsive to our throttle input.

2. GETTING TECHNICAL WITH THE ART

   What do I mean by this? Knowing what we perceive and how much of it can calculated and rendered by a small mobile device. Anyone can tell you need to go low-poly with mobiles, don't use transparent materials or real-time lights etc. But none of it sounds like a good thing when you're trying to make an environment as dense as a Jungle. So I had to make up in other departments or come up with alternatives to make it look convincingly good. Here's how I dealt with these:

   Avoiding Transparent Shaders: Then? how am I supposed to make these trees? model every leaf? Well simple answer is to use cutout shaders, but you need to be careful with the borders to make them look good enough.

Avoiding Realtime Lights: And make everything look flat? Not really, bake everything flat. Sounds so obvious right? To me too, but the limitations and imperfections of baking inside unity made me turn to Blender for this. I baked the lighting separately and multiplied on top of flat textures using simple custom shaders. But why separate? why this extra calculation of multiplying lightmap? Because I texture my objects differently. Let me explain in next part.

  Texture Efficiently: When making terrains, the biggest challenge with them is the texture sizes, especially if you want to bake lighting on them as well. To combat this, part of my solution was mentioned above, separate the lighting and turn down the resolution, blurry shadows are not that big of a compromise. What actually is a big compromise are the blurry textures. Most terrain building tools have solution for this: repeat the texture and blend it with a mask. That's what I do, blend low resolution textures with a low resolution map and multiply it with a low resolution shadow map. The memory footprint of entire combination is much smaller and looks far more high quality.

  Make Low Poly Models: Yeah, but not a practical solution if you're not trying to achieve that style. So What did I do? Thanks to the Edge Splitting inside Blender you can fake smooth surfaces with a good contrast of defining edge lines, it utilizes the Normals of mesh to do this which often left unused in mobile development. I had to be careful with the angles b/w faces a lot of the times but it's a doable when you're not dealing with a lot of faces. Again you might not be that impressed by the bike you see in the game, but there were more to be added, you can check some of them out here: @adventureridergame • Instagram

  Ambient Occlusion: So up until now I discussed were pretty much making up for hardware limitation that we have with mobiles. But how about making it look more realistic? So in my opinion, ambient occlusion is probably the most convincing factor of lighting when it comes to make it look real. It's the indirect light that our mind cannot process by itself but it can see it's there. That means, it can also see when it's not there. So when baking lights, I made sure I'm not overlooking this part. Oh and because our mind is not capable of calculating it, we are allowed to have imperfections here. I hope it made sense.

//VIDEO:

ENTITY-COMPONENT-SYSTEMS (2022-2023)

Project

Pixelshire (2023)

Project

While working with PTW India, I made some contributions to this game as a contractor.

//Technical Highlights:

1. REPROGRAMMING OF INPUTS

   Imagine a game with hours of gameplay was built doing Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.K) everywhere in the code. It's all fun and games until you need to support another input device such as gamepad, which exactly what they asked me to do. First thing I did to replace these Input calls with mine, so the game is not listening to Unity but ME, for inputs. I'm now the middle-man who can listen to all the devices and tell to the game. In fact most game engines handle the input like that, you define input codes which are triggered by devices.
   But the story didn't finish here, you have icons all over the UI telling what key does what, and in expected fashion they were just static sprites of keyboard keys. So I created components which would pick the right sprite based on last device and key linked to the specific input code and update them real-time.
But story didn't finish here either, now when you're playing with gamepad, you're no longer using a mouse. Which means the entire UI is waiting for pointer hover and clicks. Solution? I became the middle man again, but this time for Unity. Now I'm lying about these pointer events to unity based on navigational inputs from gamepad.
In the end it was a neat set of components which turned out to be more usable than I thought. I might rewrite them sometime to make a library out of it.

2. CHARACTER CUSTOMIZATION

Since it was a 2D game, customisation might sound simple on surface. Break the character down in parts and change sprites to change the features. Yeah, pretty much. But thing is, that character is animated. Using sprite sheets. Using Unity's age old animations. If you ever animated things this way you'd know the depth of problem here. Now every customisation would need sprite sheet for every animation, and we would need to create animation file for each of these sheets. And no way I was doing that much manual work. Solution? I animated numbers, I first renamed the sprites based on the properties and frame number and turned into a library of sprites, then every time that number was changed from animation I would compile the name of target sprite based on customisation properties and frame number of animation and set that sprite. It's hard to elaborate in few words here so you can always write me an email if you need more explanation.

Again, there were more things I did, such as integrating Steam DLCs, adding weapons etc. But these two tasks were special.

Team Pokers (2018-2022)

Project

The biggest project of my career till now. Worked on it for more than 4 years in my time with Hornet Dynamics.

It's a Professional Poker game built for Android and Windows PC platforms and it grown to a Casino platform in those years with additional games including Baccarat, Power Ball etc. The game was released under different titles for multiple clients, unfortunately I'm not allowed to share those names. What I can do share the things I did on that project.

//Technical Highlights:

1. A MIX OF MVC & OBSERVER PATTERN

   This is probably the best way you can build ANY multiplayer game! I know it may sound weird using these architectures for games, but it works wonders.
   Let me explain how the mix works, so MVC inspired me to keep my data and views separate. View in a game could be your player, the game room itself etc. But they all are just data on server, so data layer here is pretty much replicating that data here. This data is in one place and completely separate from view. It's critical when you want to reuse your work where your designs (views) are ever changing. Now, in standard MVC you would have controllers updating the views but here views themselves are observing the data itself. It allows us to have multiple views for the same data and they simply work on their own. I'd probably have a dedicated post about this entire architecture sometime.

2. A LOCAL TCP SERVER-CLIENTS

For what? You may ask. Not for running a local multiplayer session if you guessed that. The need arises when we're trying a target professional players. They like to play multiple games simultaneously, but a unity game can only run in one window, we could run all the games in one window fullscreen but then they got more monitors. Only practical solution was to have multiple windows, like a real Windows application. Alright, so build 2 games, one for lobby and one for game room. Nothing is stopping us from running multiple instances of them, right? Yes, pretty much. But now we have a new problem, each game room will make a new connection to server, so potentially one user could consume 10CCU if he wanted to, which is not very cost effective. That's where I built this small local TCP server, where lobby maintains the connection from remote server while itself being a local server to the game rooms, those are communicating through lobby using this local connection.

3. EMBEDDING UNITY RUNTIME

Embedding where? To Windows Forms. Windows forms are one way to build Windows software, the each window they open is called a Form. Since we were making a multi-window game we needed to have those features, because that's how a windows user would expect a multi-window software to work on his machine. Now we wouldn't want to build the entire game in a completely different development environment right, what's the point of using cross platform game engine then. Luckily Unity allows us to embed it's windows build into a separate windows software, which is what we did.

4. CUSTOM UI AND ANIMATION FRAMEWORK

No we didn't reinvent the wheel here, it would be #1 highlight otherwise. What I mean by framework is set of components which allowed us to create any functional UI with pretty much no new code at all. The way it works is every basic data type are turned into a "provider" and then there are handlers to each of these providers. There are not many ways you'd handle the data if you think about it, an image url is most likely be shown as sprite. Some amount will be shown on text field. Some bool will toggle on and off the objects. So components broken down to this granular level provided a great amount of flexibility.
What about the animations? Well there's nothing wrong about animating objects using unity, you can move around objects, change colors of things. But we wanted to do more and they were not really static. So again animations were broken down into small component, a component to move around things, one to change color of things, one to animate texts etc. Magic happens the way you can combine them. So essentially an animation is a value interpolating from 0 to 1, and you want to do certain things in this transition. Now you could run multiple 0-1 together or push multiple 0-1 inside one big 0-1 to make a timeline, I don't know if this makes sense. I'll probably add few pictures here later to explain myself better.

There were more things as well, Like building a localization solution that works realtime to add/update translations, building a custom installer and updater for the windows version, implementing deferred deep linking for referrals etc.

//PLATFORMS:

Microsoft Windows (Link)

Android (Link)

DEAD ESCAPE VR (2016)

Project

Silent Home VR (2015-2016)

Project

HTML5 Games (2014)

Project

When I started working at Supermonkeyfun, in September of 2014, these were the first projects I worked on. These were targeted at devices running Firefox OS so Unity wasn't the option, also not to mention that most of the Firefox mobile devices ran on a very inferior hardware so we had to look for other options.

Thankfully we found Construct 2, a great tool to make games for web, I really love it and highly recommend it. It was easy to learn and had a great feature set with a tonne of online support. In fact it was so easy that I completed 3 games in about 3 months.

Zombie Smasher

A game where you kill little zombies by tapping on them, game gets harder by each level. Zombies keep getting faster and harder zombies keep getting unlocked as you race to end of levels grid. Same game was doing great on android so bringing it to the new platform seemed like a good idea.

Game got good reception, though I had to make another trimmed down version for low end devices as they were having problems running the original one.

Classic Snake

Remember the game from old Nokia devices? I had spent countless hours beating top scores on that game back in my school days so I was glad to make that game myself.
Game has both, the classic endless mode, and the other one with mazes from the newer version of the original game i.e. Snake II.
To add the feel of nostalgia we added the layout of original phones to the GUI.
Turned out not many people were interested in playing that game. It was the least successful of the threes, but I loved it and may be more people like me as well, they just don't belong to majority I guess.

Tetrix Ultimate

The Tetris game, I don't need to say much about this one. Everyone love this game, I love it a lot. If I am to pick one of three as favorite, this would be my choice.
The game was really fun to make, implemented swipe gestures for the first time and they felt really intuitive. People loved the game and we loved seeing it topping the charts.

Later in september 2016, we started working on Tizen platform and as the OS is really friendly with web technologies I ported these games to Tizen as well. Kudos to Construct 2 again as it was almost as simple as clicking of a button, though I had to write a little plugin for some platform specific features.

//PLATFORMS:

Firefox Marketplace (Discontinued)

Pages

Project Y

Adventure Rider (2020)

ENTITY-COMPONENT-SYSTEMS (2022-2023)

Pixelshire (2023)

Team Pokers (2018-2022)

DEAD ESCAPE VR (2016)

Silent Home VR (2015-2016)

HTML5 Games (2014)

Zombie Smasher

Classic Snake

Tetrix Ultimate