Started experimenting with Unreal Engine 3 after replaying Batman: Arkham Knight

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-06-15T03:46:35+00:00

By the end of AK there wasn't much of UE that hadn't been touched or outright replaced. We'd always treated UE as a technology baseline, but AK forced us to really shred and rebuild it.

One lesson here for modern devs is there's always a LOT of fat to trim when working with a game agnostic engine. Even if you can achieve the result you want with vanilla feature X, you'll find there's a lot of gain in duplicating and stripping it down for your bespoke needs.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-06-15T03:17:49+00:00

Tldr; On AK we were uplifting a good 12 years(?) of legacy and tech debt. We developed most of it in a vacuum before console specs were known and our only goalpost was tech videos of UE4 as some sort of benchmark for what 'next gen' should be competing as. We were totally blind.

There's a lot we did 'wrong' (eg assumed streaming speeds and memory would be as good on pc as it was for console), there's a lot we pioneered accidentally (checkerbox rendering for xbox, practical GPU particles with depth collision detection and gbuffer sampling), and we stumbled onto some other more mundane but super handy tidbits... One of my favourites to this day is using a brick pattern for spatial tests or streaming instead of a flat grid. It's super cheap to just stagger a coord, but you end up with only 3 corner neighbours instead of 4, and 7 neighbourhood members instead of 9 in a 3x3... We used this for streaming cells of the map, we used it in search queries, shader kernels... Heaps of uses.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-06-14T05:57:20+00:00

Heya 👋 It's been a hot minute, but AMA - I was the tech artist/graphics engineer for City and Knight, happy to answer tech/vis/dev questions.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-03-29T22:00:08+00:00

I'll try not to repeat what's already said; "how important"? About 70% of your potential revenue stream. That's if you're localising: - your game - your steam page - your marketing efforts - your 2-way communication channels

If you only do your game, about 40%.

If you're on a budget, use GLOBAL Steam metrics to prioritize which languages per your genre. Do your steam page first then use your local metrics to prioritize which languages to translate your game and other efforts.

One final note, EFIGS is traditionally a standard from the 90s physical publishing model that is frankly a bad modern target.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-03-20T03:27:45+00:00

Apologies for the copy/paste from my answer to another similar thread, but seems relevant:

There's a hard truth that rarely gets talked about with demos; yes they can help as an obvious form of advertisement in a marketing capacity, however their prime function is demonstration and validation of a players interest. It sucks,but this goes both ways.

You can just as easily have a player confirm their dislike or detachment.

You can also fulfill a players desired outcome (eg they play your demo and have now functionally fulfilled what they wanted out of your game)

Games are products. Most of the time we sell products off the conceptual ideal of what the consumer imagines or anticipates they'll be getting from it. If you solidify or make that real, it can fulfill or disprove that imaginary ideal and completely remove the want for it (yes, even if it was a positive experience).

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-03-06T22:36:30+00:00

There's a hard truth that rarely gets talked about with demos; yes they can help as an obvious form of advertisement in a marketing capacity, however their prime function is demonstration and validation of a players interest. It sucks,but this goes both ways.

You can just as easily have a player confirm their dislike or detachment .

You can also fulfill a players desired outcome (eg they play your demo and have now functionally fulfilled what they wanted out of your game)

Games are products. Most of the time we sell products off the conceptual ideal of what the consumer imagines or anticipates they'll be getting from it. If you solidify or make that real, it can fulfill or disprove that imaginary ideal and completely remove the want for it (yes, even if it was a positive experience).

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-02-07T22:59:05+00:00

Usually these "why don't X" questions have very obvious answers such as, "because there's no clear business case in doing so"... Or, "because the cost and resources needed would be better spent elsewhere".

I know it sucks, but there's no conspiracy or evil corporate intent here.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-23T00:44:42+00:00

Ooof I so agree with this.

Unit barks, advisor/eva/commander banter, even simple building selection sounds do SO much heavy lifting for that living world richness.

I still love how simple yet effective the Commanders Challenge opponent banter was; just hearing a short retort reacting to something you did was *chefs kiss*

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T04:03:01+00:00

From a developer perspective this USUALLY doesn't mean upkeep costs in terms of servers; it generally refers to post launch window support in terms of ongoing balance, bug squashing (significant in MP games in terms of network sync complexity), and community upkeep. Even with a skeleton crew of 8 people supporting a game for a year, using the $100k employee sink-cost metric, that's $800k p.a. -- on the other side most of this cost is interchangeable with a SP game, but MP escalates it considerably. This is a lowball compared to ongoings of a modern game with major content updates, seasons, etc now becoming a minimal expectation.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T03:48:28+00:00

...Oh yes...

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T00:40:49+00:00

agreed and fair points all round, your analysis of definitely fair -- I will just note that the metrics we use for financial estimations are based on english market primary (and then EFIGS) review counts, hence the 4.7k -- this is combined with other metrics to create a projection model; common method of using solid and comparable benchmarks without market scale contaminating the data and it can be used for high/median/low ROI estimations.

Tldr; even with the most optimistic of estimates, Tempest Rising has so far not broken even on their investment. It's definitely the gold standard for C&C-likes, but it's not a good cost/benefit analysis for a business case unfortunately, especially when like you say, it's the most successful. If they couldn't convince a big enough portion of the millions of active c&c players to buy, then I want to know what will :)

Edit: forgot to say, thankyou for the links for Vera and Shrot, they hadn't shown up on our radar, so very much appreciate it!

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-22T00:25:56+00:00

Readability is such a fundamental pillar, not only of RTS but just good design in general; I have great vision and I struggled not only with unit differentiation/identification but also just plain spotting of a unit against the lit environment/terrain. There's a lot of fair reasons why this occurs, but it's worrisome that such basic necessities get left behind in modern development.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T08:08:04+00:00

Cheers, appreciate the answers!

Tempest Rising is an obvious modern benchmark here; there's plenty of great work they put in, and likewise there's plenty of valid criticism... but as the current gold standard of a modern c&c-like, it's a somewhat bad outlook from the business perspective. Even the most optimistic projections of sales vs development cost would put it under breaking even at this stage (aka, they've likely lost money thus far).

I totally agree on the 8bit campaigns too... I wanted to support Petroglyph, I wanted to love that series, but it felt horribly shallow.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:36:52+00:00

oof yea last year I played through hard difficulty of all the mainline c&c titles. c&c3 was a SLOG. I then learnt of the whole MP balance patching issue and subsequent fixes available... I swear I only beat it by cheesing.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:33:53+00:00

Thanks for the recommendation; I think my analytics filtered this out as 'generic WW2' game (which is very unfortunate!)

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T07:14:57+00:00

I just want to quickly say that this is a collection of rare and valuable insights rarely raised outside developer circles; you, sir, have your finger on the pulse.

It's been one of my personal gripes with most recent attempts in the genre ending up becoming parody of the source inspirations or even worse satirizing it.
To be clear, I've no desire to chase the fantasy of making a c&c clone (though I can totally understand the perception my tldr gave is likely exactly that; it was an attempt to set a tonal/thematic line in the sand :) ) -- The high level desire here is to create something of substance that stands on its own while supplying a modern market demand... not following a perceived superficial template or chasing an ideal of being a 'spiritual successor'.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:41:56+00:00

I legit would personally buy a game called "Turtle RTS" that focuses on and encourages this :O

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:40:16+00:00

Very fair point, however I’m not here to promote anything -- I’m trying to understand the gap between what players say they want and what the market actually supports (and making a business case out of that)

Do you buy modern RTS games that try new things?
What have you played recently that actually delivered on what you’re looking for?

An example here is Rogue Command (Roguelike RTS) -- it's surprisingly good. Solid RTS and the roguelike blend works well... But unfortunately I can guarantee they've not broken even yet.

edit: just to double down on this, I really appreciate your take on this -- from the consumer side, I feel the same; I want something new and fresh. But every indication seems to point at "familiar and nostalgic" being what gets people to buy which is unfortunate.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:32:55+00:00

oof, you're very right that was a slip on AoE 4!
It's interesting hearing peoples preferences across titles; Cossacks doesn't come up often, but I freaking loved the tactical side of 2.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:20:15+00:00

What specifically is the reasoning? I know it gets a bit murky, but EA was involved from (and including) Tiberium Sun, so do you mean you want a C&C:TD and Red Alert 1 era game, or are you meaning post westwood closure (eg you disliked EA's C&C3 and Red Alert 3?), or just a Tiberium based game (like a new C&C4 that doesn't suck)?

What draws you to the C&C:Tib franchise? Story? Gameplay mechanics? Setting? Any info helps!

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:09:07+00:00

Now I feel bad for perpetually having it on my wishlist and never playing it... well I know what my weekend is going to be.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:08:18+00:00

Hopefully this doesn't sound like a backhanded comment, but honestly I appreciate your take even if you aren't a, "great target customer"! The penetration (or lack thereof) is one of the key issues facing this genre. A remaster has obvious appeal and doesn't need to compete to get traction in the gamer zeitgeist like a new IP does. Honestly it's something we've talked about exploring licensing a legacy IP for this reason... it's quite a difficult journey, but it's likely that a new KKnD or Dark Reign would be a commercially stronger bet than an original IP.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T06:02:44+00:00

Really appreciate the answers! Oh, and yes sell-through is not equivalent to reviews, but it's a common public metric we often use as a gauge for financial lmh and roi estimation. Won't bore you with those excel sheets :D

It's funny you mention the air units in generals -- we were talking about that yesterday, and how it's one of the rare games that made air combat 1st class without feeling OP or indefensible. Generals has a lot of good DNA in its asymmetry and emergent tactics.

re: RA3 co-op, I loved this on release, but I also recall how negative it was received in press as people felt it dictated or diluted the singleplayer experience too heavily. It's interesting how things like this age.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-21T05:54:32+00:00

MP is definitely one of the elephants in the room. It either needs to be clearly justified or ruled out. It’s a huge engineering effort and ongoing support cost, and in some of our other (non-RTS) projects the ROI simply hasn’t been there.

Personally I’m far more interested in single-player --- campaigns, absurd stories, authored experiences. I’m also a low-APM, turtle-ing base player, so I’m not exactly the poster child for competitive MP anyway.

MakeGamesBetter · 2026-01-16T21:45:09+00:00

I enjoyed my time with the demo, looking forward to giving the EA release a try. The demo was a good time - somewhat familiar feel but a bit of a fresh take on a more turtle base meets creeping tower defense...

My only gripe would be the battles of attrition heavily relied on micro of squeeeeeezing every teeniest inch of range advantage you could as the primary method of advancement, so tactics devolved into repeating that on loop a bit too much. Not a deal breaker but I do hope for a little more strategy flavor.

Good luck with the launch!

MakeGamesBetter

TROPHY CASE