Mega Cat Studios founder James Deighan speaks about how the team executed against high visual fidelity expectations while targeting lower-resource platforms. He discusses how working in Unity 6 for an upcoming title helped optimize the lighting and the process of bringing it to all console platforms.
James Deighan , CEO and Founder, Mega Cat Studios
I'm James. I'm the founder of Mega Cat Studios.
So Mega Cat Studios is coming up on year 11. We were founded on the desired interest to create new retro titles, originally in scene assembly.
Around the end of year one, we started quickly venturing into Unity and a modern approach with the games that still have this retro ethos.
So, a considerable number of our team members grew up playing Backyard Baseball, Backyard Soccer, and Backyard Football. It was originally released by Humongous Entertainment. So, in 1997, there was the first title.
Mega Cat Studios actually just got done re-releasing Baseball '97 on Steam last October with a significant and wonderful groundswell of fans showing up.
Taking on high visual fidelity
The biggest technical challenge that we identified at preproduction was executing against the visual fidelity that the company that now owns all the Backyard Sports franchise wants for their fans and for their brand.
The leadership team at Playground Productions does not come from games, but from film and television. So needless to say, their expectations are very high.
When you're creating something that has analogs to film and television, I would say that lighting, post-processing, level of detail and texture fidelity are significant hurdles to overcome. This is especially the case when your target platforms include lower GPU resources that can't really work across tons and tons of real time.
It requires a much more sophisticated, usually multifaceted, approach where lights are baked, there are some light probes, and some fake lights. We're going to fake some of these things with textures for color correction and just a significant amount of lighting magic. This will bring them to that final product that I think fans and the target audience that we're bringing it to, kids, can really jump out of their seat for and get excited about.
Tooling to make things pop
The Backyard Sports franchise originally was launched as a kids title and knowing that it's a kids title, it needs to be poppy, digestible, and probably very relevant to the other media they consume outside of games.
In the current production on the new title in the Backyard Sports franchise, we're just getting to what we would consider to be the end of establishing a final lighting pipeline.
Along the way, we've gone through a dozen different configurations – the intermix, 10 different lights in the scene, 30 lights in the scene, three lights in a scene, one global sun, and just finding ways to manipulate.
In the skybox, where do we place the light? How much light should come from it? How do we also make sure that there's not a shadow cast in this stadium or in this field, depending on the sport that's interrupting gameplay?
If someone's throwing a ball, no matter what type of ball it is, the shadow being cast is a very important telegraph for someone to go to pick up and play. It’s important to make sure that it feels good and it's accessible.
We've been using Unity since Unity 4, and I have fond memories of going through when HDRP was new. And after URP became the solution, we made a significant effort to basically champion that, and let that be how we're leading most of our lighting pipelines across the big Mega Cat titles.
Seeing that extended with Unity 6 and already having that familiarity with our last several commercial titles, it just feels like the perfect fit for Mega Cat and for the new Backyard Sports title. URP gives us some sense of graphical fidelity that has the flexibility to still create some real-time lighting and textures. Having some adaptive pro volume solutions in this more complex geometry that's closer to the camera really helps make things pop and look beautiful without consuming all the resources we need to make the gameplay.
Hitting lower-resource platforms
Looking at the Backyard Sports franchise and our target to bring it to every console platform, regardless of the resource budget, there's a number of technical considerations we have to explore.
How are the textures stored? How big are the textures? How do we create something that has enough real-time energy that delights, is directional and beautiful, and lets us still sprinkle in some magic here and there.
The number one risk and the big challenge to overcome that Unity 6 has supported in a great way is that now we can hit those lower-resource platforms with significantly less rework and concessions.
When you’re making these early plans and pipeline determinations, and really validating how you're bringing something technically to life, you usually have to work backwards from whatever that lowest common denominator is for graphics processing power.
Unity 6 brings a level of stability and optimization for how textures are managed and stored. Lighting is consuming the resource mix to something that becomes significantly easier for us to shorten the pre-production window and still bring the game to the fans.
Seeing the new Unity 6 features with global illumination was particularly exciting for them as well, because it actually gets closer to a shared language to the film and television exercises that they had some hands-on experience with.
On our side, being able to reduce some of the friction with how we're managing lightmaps and how we’re using a lot of the fake lighting solution also just makes the game look much more beautiful, much more quickly in production.
And the sooner we nail some of those production pipelines, the easier production becomes for the following year as we're bringing the game to the end.
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