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How we built an entire universe in a year and a half.

11/18/2018

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Case study: Morphite

Morphite world environment with trees and ruins

The mission

The well known mobile publisher Crescent Moon Games was looking to make a universe filled with procedural generated planets for mobile. They needed a solution that could provide a huge amount of content for the game without investing too much time on it.
Our mission was to help them achieve a cool looking lowpoly aesthetics game that could reach the top of the App Store within time and budget.

​

The Outcome

We figured out how to make this worlds procedurally generated, filled with procedurally generated animals, spaceships, space stations, colors, dungeons, cities, etc.. while maintaining a consistent lowpoly aesthetics through all the project. Which also helped to save time in rigging and texturing.

The Impact

Featured for 2 weeks on the Appstore.
A total of 41k premium sales on the Appstore with more than $200k on revenue.
A million downloads on Android.
​
Ported for PC, Xbox, PS4 and Nintedo Switch.

Services

Environment Design.
Character Design.
3D Procedural generation design.
Mobile optimization.

Press

https://toucharcade.com/2017/09/22/toucharcade-game-of-the-week-morphite/
https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/075340/morphite-review-a-space-adventure-that-gets-everything-spot-on/
https://www.gamezebo.com/2017/09/26/morphite-review-no-metroids-sky/​

STORY

Crescent Moon Games is a well established publisher on iOS and Android that focuses on premium games with a huge emphasis on good quality graphics. They leaded the game development followed by the game development team at We're Five Games, who took care of the programming side and animations, Blowfish Studios a game development company that published the game on consoles, various freelancers for level design and music and us, Polygonal Mind, who were in charge of making the 3D content of the game.
Morphite is a casual atmospheric FPS mainly inspired by Metroid prime and No Man’s Sky.
The premise was to have a main story with fixed planets and a procedural universe, meaning, endless planets to visit and explore filled with different animals and vegetation that you can kill and scan, oh and it had to run on mobile.
Morphite took us a year and a half since the first art test that we made for the game to the final game release, there are tons of problems we solved and dozens of stories to be told about the game, but this time we are going to focus on.
  • The lowpoly look and colors.
  • The procedural levels.
  • The procedural creatures.
  • Fixed main story levels.

The lowpoly look and colors

One of the reasons this game is made by big flat polygons is optimization, less polygons, less draw calls, also most of the models of the game doesn't have any textures so every color you see is a material, and every material changes its hue based on the planet you are visiting.
This is applied to animals, items, characters, trees, environment, dungeons,.... probably everything except the weapons and main characters.
Feline in 3D wireframe with different materials
Here are some examples of the same animal in different planets:
Feline / tiger variations inside Morphite

The procedural levels

One of the most ambitious features of the game, being able to visit an endless number of planets was also one of the most challenging ones, we started by creating boundaries on the exploration, meaning, inside a planet you can just walk or use land vehicles and the only way in or out of this planet is by using your drop pod, this allowed us to use a procedural level system like you would see in games like  Diablo.
The procedural levels are made out of pre-defined terrain chunks that overlap each other with connectors. Taking one chunk as a root and the rest of them spawning randomly from it, like a tree.
Here is an screenshot of an entire planet from above!
Procedurally generated level for Morphite

We had to be careful to make the terrain chunks connectors look natural so the player could not see them easily, but also they had to be fixed so we could add doors, walls and caves between them.
Morphite exits with doors and closed caves
We also separated the terrain from the walls, allowing us make walls variations for each terrain chunk.
Thanks to this we could use the same terrain piece various times without feeling repetitive and also repurpose them as caves some times.
Morphite terrain variations

The procedural creatures

If you play Morphite you will find that there are dozens of different creatures, critters, enemies and animals, this is mainly because we made a huge ton of them, but, also because the way we made them allowed us to mix between creatures and create easy variations.
Before creating an animal we decided what parts were going to move with a simple shape sketch, this allow us to see how many parts does the animal really have and also decide which parts would need variations.
Shape sketch with body parts of a feline / tiger
After deciding what need to be done we used Zbrush to make the basic body shape.
Used ZSpheres to make a quick topology.
Maya to separate the body parts, fix the topology, add materials and ready for Unity!
Process of making a 3D tiger for morphite, from base to topology, fixes and materials and in-game view
Having the animal broken down into separated parts allowed us to make new animals out of already done animals parts, make body parts variations and also saved us some skin weighting time.
​
Most of the wild life in Morphite has at least 6-7 head variations 4-5 body variations and different limbs.
Tiger / feline with 17 head variations in 3D for Morphite
The feline has up to 17 head variations!

The fixed main story levels

Morphite has 16 handcrafted story levels, most of them planets that are a result of a collaboration between the whole team and a well defined workflow, even though we all worked on remote.
First the awesome level designer Mike Madden, made a blockout of the level with cubes inside Unity.
​
Then we took those cubes into Maya, and organise them into regions.
3D wirefrime for a level for Morphite
Afterwards we take every region to Zbrush, and using Dynamesh we are able to sculpt the terrain out of those blocks.
Using Decimation Master we reduced the polycount of the terrain to a desired amount and export back to Maya
Picture
We used Maya to fix the non-good looking topology that polygon reduction tools like Decimation Master  usually make, plus adding some special details that are easier to be done on a polygonal modelling software.
Also adding materials and exporting all as separated FBX files.
Level from Morphite in 3D
Now time to import the terrain into Unity so the game designer and the programmer can add functionality to the level.
Final version to Unity from a level of Morphite
In game Morphite screenshot

The release

Morphite went out on iOS on 20/09/2017 as a premium game. With a great Appstore feature for 2 weeks.
​
Having a total of 41000 purchases that generated more than $200000 in revenue.

Months later it was released on Android as a free game with in app purchases.
Having more than a million downloads that generated more than $40000 in revenue.

The game was also ported for Steam PC by We're five games team.

And it got ported to Xbox, PS4 and Nintendo Switch by Blowfish Studios.
​

Conclusion

Morphite is a huge mobile game, not just because it has an open world to play, but because it has an endless amount of them!
On this case study I focused on the most relevant parts when it comes to the visual side of the game but there is way more to cover like procedural space stations, vendors, ships, humanoids, side quest...
This game was made by a remote team, working on different time zones and continents through collaboration and dedication, and I'm really proud of all the work the managed to ship.

Post by:

Daniel @toxsam

Daniel García is the founder and creative director at Polygonal Mind.
In love with videogames since he can remember, passionate about geometry, VR addict and energetic persona.


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