Cthulhu Thursday: The Technology of the Wasted Land

Part 3 of our 3 part series of developer diaries on Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is on online – this one is looking at the game’s technology and how we’re using our own games engine to bring Cthulhu to life!

If we’d chosen 2D, then to show all of these animations for each character means having sprite sheets for all the attacks, weapons, spells, madness, death and moment. In a 2D engine the animation is a bit like a flipbook, where you overlay one image with the next. All of the different frames of animation for each unit are stored on a single sheet – the sprite sheet, for the engine to grab and display. The problem is that the more actions a unit needs to perform, the larger the sprite sheet becomes.

So the decision to drop 2D sprites wasn’t that difficult. From the start we always wanted to target more powerful platforms i.e. iPad / iPad2 maybe Xbox 360/ PS3, but keep the quality as close as we could across all platforms while pushing up rendering quality, so opting for 3D models would help us achieve that. The graphics scale in detail according to the platform, so you can clearly see the differences between the standard resolution (480×320) and Retina version on the iPhone for example.

Gamezebo Developer Diary: Part 1 Design, Part 2 Art, Part 3 Technology.

(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)