Think of the opening scenes of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies. No, not the badass battle with the Last Alliance of Men and Elves against Sauron, but a few minutes later, in Hobbiton, with that delightful tin whistle music: a postcard-perfect rural idyll, circle-doored houses under grassy hills, hobbits tending to their gardens.
This pastoral paradise is what Frodo, Gandalf, and the Fellowship is fighting to protect, as Tolkien and Jackson make clear by contrasting it with the horrifying industrial war machines of Isengard and Mordor. What we build and defend is no less an important part of fantasy as what we destroy and oppose. So why aren’t more games focusing on it?
In Dwarrows, the peaceful Wood Elves have been driven from their homelands by a great flood. It’s up to you, as one of three characters from the Royal Company of Colonisers, to help them rebuild in new and distant lands. It’s part fantasy action adventure, part peaceful town builder, and all wholesome.
“I can’t speak for everyone on this subject, but I can say from personal experience that as some of us age and take on more responsibilities and stresses, sometimes a high octane, action packed adventure isn’t what we’re looking for after work some days,” art director Andy Wood tells us. “Sometimes you just want to relax and unwind. That’s what I, at least, wanted Dwarrows to fulfill. There might be a few things going on in the world right now that leave a lot of people looking for a warm blanket and a cup of tea.”
From the look of the trailer and the screenshots, that’s Dwarrows in a cosy nutshell. The art style is reminiscent of a Disney theme park, and the trailer music sounds like something you’d hear while you were there. It looks comfortingly familiar enough to have emerged fully formed, but Wood says, “the aesthetic developed quite slowly over a few years, beginning with my fascination with handpainted art. Some hand-painted texturing can be quite complex, though, and I wanted a style that was easy and fast for asset creation. We were planning a massive world, so I had to accept that it needed to be sufficiently simple if I were going to create all of the visuals.”
Dwarrows developer Lithic Entertainment is a small indie. Photorealism was never going to be an option. So it was fortunate that Wood happens to “really enjoy an older style of 3D modeling, the kind you’d see when poly count was a bigger problem than it is now. There’s something really cosy and nostalgic about it. Pairing that with UE4’s post-processing and real-time lighting, we set out to create a world wherein the visuals matched the sort of feelings we were trying to uphold in the game. Specifically as it pertained to peacefulness and cosiness.”
While the art style is necessarily restrained, the game is not. This is a town builder that also includes action adventure and RPG elements. Players pick one of three characters – a dwarf, a gnome, and a halfling, to pick arguably the humblest and most wholesome of fantasy stereotypes – each with unique abilities, and then explore ‘a peaceful and atmospheric world’, according to the game’s Kickstarter page. Those journeys will see you undertake quests for strange and interesting characters, explore dungeons and solve puzzles therein, and gather resources, with all such efforts reinvested in building your idyllic fantasy haven. It’s a lot for a small team to undertake – which was the biggest challenge?
“We probably all agree that town building was the most challenging,” Wood says. “We had to keep it simple enough for players new to city builders to enjoy themselves, and stable enough for players to leave on adventures without having to stress that everything is on fire back at home, and remain meaningful and engaging all the while. It was a tricky balancing act.”
Creating such an intricate system alongside everything else may seem a huge undertaking for such a small team, and indeed Dwarrows has been in the works for over four years, with its first prototype made in Unreal Engine 3 (aka, UDK). Nevertheless, technical director Alain Bellemare tells us that switching to UE4 was “a no-brainer.” Bellemare says he “needed more control than what was available in the free version of UDK for what we were trying to achieve.
“We were at a point where we wanted to redesign the prototype and transform it into what Dwarrows is today. Fortunately for us, UE4 had just been made public around this time. I installed the editor, started playing around with the tools, and within an hour I was blown away at how much more quickly I could create a good looking scene.
“I made pro/con lists of our options at the time, and UE4 was coming up all pros: fantastic run-time performance, engine source code access, C++ backend (my programming language of choice for game development), amazing lighting, cross-platform support, and how quickly we could now prototype with Blueprints. This was well beyond the threshold I needed to convince the team to switch to UE4!”
Praise for Blueprints – a visual scripting system that enables even non-programmers to create coded game elements – has been a consistent theme in this series. In Lithic’s case, “coming up with the many puzzles and puzzle components took a lot of trial and error to get right,” Bellemare says. “It became critically important for Steve, our puzzle designer, to be able to come up with the mechanisms he needed and autonomously implement them in the game, without needing to wait for me to have time for it.
“Since Blueprints are much more approachable for non-programmers, Steve was able to do just that. He built the basis for many of the puzzle elements himself, and was also able to quickly iterate through his designs without the need of a dedicated programmer.”
But Blueprints is far from the only feature that Unreal offers to help small teams achieve big things. Bellemare explains that Dwarrows is full of activity: “hundreds of townsfolk AI character always thinking away and moving about, hundreds of wild animals doing their thing, tons of active dynamic puzzles elements moving around,” as well as tens of thousands of shadow-casting trees and “who knows how many million blades of grass” in its lush open world.
It presents a huge challenge in optimisation, but fortunately, Unreal is “chock-full”, as Bellemare says, of ready-optimised tools to solve these exact problems. There’s the Foliage subsystem to help with, well, all that foliage, and “the automatic generation of LODs for all of our static and skeletal meshes, automatic shadow map caching, and distance field-based shadows were also key to making this happen.
“We also managed to reduce the amount of work for the CPU thanks to the Profiling tools built into the engine. These helped us clearly identify where our bottlenecks were and we were then able to solve the problems by spending more time where it mattered. Being able to leverage C++’s exceptional runtime performance was a great advantage, and we also made use of the Blueprint Nativisation tool, which automatically converts Blueprint script code into native C++ code.”
For a studio of fewer than ten people, these tools are invaluable. Whether it’s quickly iterating on puzzle and gameplay elements without the need for a dedicated programmer, filling out a busy open world without needing to worry at every step that you’re doing so in the most technically optimal way, or having the ability to identify what bottlenecks do exist with a simple glance, Unreal has enabled Lithic to finally ship its game after many years of work. Which means you are enabled to build something worth defending against the forces of darkness.
Dwarrows launched on Steam at the end of February. Unreal Engine 4 is now free.
In this sponsored series, we’re looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and Lithic Entertainment.