Unity 帮助 Mediatonic 将不合理的多人游戏进行整合。

向 80 年代初期的英国电视游戏节目致敬（在该节目中参赛者参加了疯狂的挑战，例如穿着荒谬的服装赛车和在游泳池中追逐人造鲨鱼），Fall Guys 在网上也表现出类似的疯狂。在多达 60 名玩家的比赛中，你是一位不折不扣的竞争者，疯狂地冲过不断升级的爆炸性混乱和比赛终点障碍，直到只剩一个胜利者。

“在灯光下，MXC 与 Total Wipeout 的融合是对皇家大逃亡游戏风格的不同理解，”Mediatonic 首席技术官 Adam Fletcher 说。在这款游戏中，玩家在明亮、爆炸性的画面和许多混乱场景中进行竞争。Fall Guys 标语？“忘记你的尊严。”它丰富多彩、轻松有趣，并且完全符合 Mediatonic 创造让人们汇聚在一起的游戏这一使命。 

设计、构建和运营多人游戏会带来独特的挑战，尤其是存在平台推广等未知变量的情况下。Fletcher 说，“与 PlayStation 的合作（在 PlayStation 4 上发布，对 Plus 用户免费）令人难以置信，因为这意味着许多玩家会在发布时玩 Fall Guys，这显然也带来了许多技术挑战。”

在之前的游戏中，Mediatonic 具有经过时间检验的后端和内容管理系统，用于维护帐户、在游戏之间进行升级和执行类似功能。但是对于 Fall Guys，Taylor 说，“我们需要大规模运行专用服务器。随着游戏在 PlayStation、PlayStation Plus 和 Steam 上启动，我们的玩家人数变成了一个猜谜游戏。那么在发布之后，当玩家人数在圣诞节假期等促销活动和时间激增时，我们如何调整基础架构？在实时多人游戏中，这个问题很难解决。”

Multiplay 的跟踪记录及其对海量游戏托管数据的访问极具吸引力。“我们知道 Multiplay 产品极具价值，因此我们立即进行了电话沟通。他们做了很多工作，让我们获得舒适感，这一点真的很棒。甚至在我们没有进行任何商业谈判之前，他们就为我们提供了巨大的支持。”Taylor 说。

Fletcher 表示同意，“Multiplay 根据他们的历史数据和我们的营销计划向我们展示了我们的资源需求。他们计算了服务器负载、容量阈值和第一天的期望值，并以图形方式对所有数据进行了解释，因此对我们来说非常清楚。”当 Multiplay 接管游戏托管服务时，Mediatonic 感到非常高兴：“作为开发者，我们希望专注于游戏体验，Unity Multiplay 可以将我们解放出来去做这些事情。

Mediatonic’s first games were written in Flash and C++ and leveraged open-source graphics libraries. Deciding to build fewer tools but more games, they adopted the Unity platform. Over the years, they’ve benefited from a number of Unity capabilities, but for Mediatonic, one of the most important has been how Unity enables collaboration, helping designers, artists, and developers work together with the same tools and terminology.

“Unity empowers our designers, making them much more effective members of the team,” according to Taylor. “If a designer wants to turn off a behavior, it’s just a tick box instead of rewriting a lot of code – it’s 10 seconds instead of 30 minutes.” They can experiment without needing to constantly interact with the coders, and the increased number of iterations significantly improves the gameplay.

To speed and enhance their 3D modeling, Mediatonic uses Unity ProBuilder and it’s become a cornerstone of their early game-design workflows. “Our gameplay involves lots of distinct objects that have unique looks. With ProBuilder, we can export them to Maya for polishing, then reimport them relatively effortlessly,” says Taylor. During prototyping and beyond, they also take advantage of ProBuilder’s level design tools and Asset Store packages to rapidly mock up characters and gameplay.

Additionally, Mediatonic is doing a lot less hand-coding of animation systems and is instead making use of Unity Animation State Machines. “We have a ton of states and transitions between them, so just looking at the state machine on the screen is overwhelming,” adds Taylor. “With the complexity of our animations, using Unity takes a fifth of the time over any non-Unity option.” 

Taylor also noted how Unity’s advanced rendering and post-processing for multiple platforms have increased Mediatonic’s productivity significantly. “From a very high level we’re writing the game from a platform-agnostic perspective, knowing that Unity has solved most platform issues. For example, a big Unity benefit for us is the abstraction of writing shaders. We can write them once and deploy them everywhere, including for different pipelines, platforms, and graphics hardware.”

Mediatonic likes having easy access to both Unity Integrated Success Services and the Multiplay team. “We have problems at weird times, but there’s rarely a delay getting a response, so we chat on Slack with people who know our team and our product,” says Taylor. The Unity support package is, for Mediatonic, insurance against the unexpected. “In the past we’ve had issues crop up quite close to launch and have been able to work directly with the Unity team to put together a very timely solution.”

And because the Unity team has such a deep working knowledge of the studio and its products, they’re able to collaborate with development on Unity features that are still in the pipeline. “We’ll be working on something for our next game, and Unity will ask if we want to talk to their engineers who are working on a capability that might help out. Again, it’s all about collaboration.”

One of the benefits of syncing with the Unity and Multiplay support teams is early access to technology in development. For Mediatonic, a studio developing a multiplayer game of this size for the first time, being able to use Unity’s new Matchmaking solution (in beta at time of writing) was a blessing.

Taylor notes, “Many studios spend a lot of precious development time building a matchmaker – often for each new game – so being able to use an off-the-shelf solution and adapt it quickly to meet our needs has been great.” 

The Matchmaking solution integrates with Multiplay’s game hosting “out of the box” so Mediatonic benefits from a system that not only groups players based on the required criteria, but finds them the right server too.

刚刚发布了 Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout，Mediatonic 在每月“新季节”之前的日程便已经排满，包括新化妆品和其他主题。他们期待着尝试 Unity Physics 和语音聊天，可能会使用 Unity 的 Vivox 解决方案。当然，他们最激动人心的计划是保密的。 

Fletcher 总结道，“展望未来，我们很高兴 Unity 和 Multiplay 成为我们团队的一员。我们希望有尽可能多的人能够玩我们的游戏，这意味着在最新平台上使用。Unity 帮助我们保持领先。他们致力于为我们配备最新、最精彩的游戏和托管资源。”