We’ve all watched those alien films where Earth is happily, quietly existing, and then the eccentric scientist looks at a blip on a radar monitor, says something like ‘that’s impossible’, and then the aliens start invading – haven’t we? The ones where the natives – i.e., us – are on the brink of annihilation because some scaly boys are rocking our world, literally. Well, instead of defending the planet, Gearstorm lets you go and be the invader.
No longer hiding under our desks, humans need a new planet after the Phage wipes out our home. Go – be the hero by declaring war on another planet because you need it to survive. It would be rude not to let us share the planet when we may have ruined our own a little bit. Sharing is caring, right? However, your conquest involves far more than just running around shooting everything – you’ll scavenge materials, terraform terrain, build bases, drive vehicles, level up, experience a story, navigate survival mechanics and much more, as well as fight.
We’ve been talking to Shawn Ellis, co-founder and CEO of Iron City Games, the studio behind Gearstorm. We’ve been invading his thoughts to find out what makes Gearstorm the game it is, and to share our findings with you all. Don’t worry – he didn’t feel a thing.
First, it’s appropriate to find out a little about what Ellis and Iron City Games want to create with Gearstorm. In a game where so much is possible, what is the focus? Did the ambitious idea of including all these systems unsettle them? “It did,” Ellis admits. “But we knew we had to bring together the best of all these genres to make something truly unique. We learned early on to focus on that which is important from each system to avoid overload. We also outsourced everything we could to contractors to stay focused on development. Finally, we took a lot of time and money to do it. Gearstorm represents a massive investment of five years of development time and capital for contractor hours.”
Gearstorm is made in Unreal Engine 4, a platform in which the team feels very much at home. “We wanted to do something amazing and far-reaching, and we knew from a long history with modding that Unreal had the performance, stability, and features to help make that a reality.” The team’s extensive experience of modding and developing in Unreal started “way back with Unreal Tournament (1999) – including 2003, 2004, and some work in Unreal 3.”
But this experience wasn’t the only reason Iron City chose Unreal to make Gearstorm. Iron City Games needed an engine that could realise its many, many ideas – one that was as adaptable as the game it meant to build. “Unreal provides a solid foundation with great extensibility,” Ellis says, “which allowed us to write our own managers in separate threads that can be offloaded to other processors to handle terrain, AI, building, etc. The plethora of Unreal marketplace options and people that know how to work in the engine allowed us to outsource a lot and focus on that which only we could do. Access to the direct C++ allowed us to make the modifications we needed as well.
“Unreal gave us a lot of options to create high-performance code to tackle some of the larger issues in parallel. This C++ based engine is about the only way we could have achieved everything we did in Gearstorm and still keep the intended look and feel.”
Unreal marketplace is a platform used by creators to share, buy, and sell assets for use in the engine. It’s a great place to find assets for your game that you may not have the time or expertise to create yourself – from animations to landscape materials, blueprints to music.
A development project of this scope brings hundreds of technical and design challenges. “We wanted a big world where players could spread out and claim territory to build bases on,” Ellis says. “We also wanted to be able to blow holes and mine in that territory. A large map like this with modifiable terrain, plants, and building parts is a lot of data to monitor and update locally, as well as replicate through the network in real-time. On top of that, we also wanted large-scale AI roaming the territory. We had to perform a lot of custom multi-threaded tasks and fully leverage today’s multi-core processors to make it all work.”
The gameplay predicaments link in to all of that. “Creating a huge map featuring a large number of buildings made up of virtually countless blocks (all destructible!) demanded the development of special compression, replication, and multi-threading code. Balancing the environmental threat, AI ecosystem, NPC simulation, quests, and survival is a continual challenge.”
All that’s on the technical side of the game – things players may see but not fully appreciate. What we’ll see instead is Iron City’s approach to its community and early access development. “We stay community-focused. Even before release, we had a community of hundreds of playtesters who told us where to focus next and iterate through release and test cycles until we stop hearing about a system. We also mapped ahead of time how far we wanted to go to prove each system out and make it useful. Then we cut off development on that track until we got feedback from the community to help us focus.”
Ultimately Iron City wants to use Early Access to show the community all the new and exciting things that it is achieving with Gearstorm. Ellis tells us that “our vision is to show the community unique things we can do with this game in terms of world-building, storytelling, and hosting unique experiences thanks to the ‘Gamemaster’ mode. We actually hope to recruit a few strong Gamemasters to create those worlds and experiences as they see fit – totally their vision, with only support from us. During Steam Early Access, we want the community to give us some strategic direction and focus. We also want to immediately respond to our players with fix and optimisation releases to make sure everything works right, scales up, performs well, and is optimised.”
So! Always wanted to be the galactic conqueror, rather than conquered? The blip on the radar, rather than its victim? Gearstorm has your back. We probably could have just asked Ellis the questions, now we think about it, but the brain probe felt more appropriate
Gearstorm is out in Steam Early Access now. Unreal Engine 4 development 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 Iron City Games.