314 Arts studio lead and founder Justin Miersch discusses how the team used the Screen Space Global Illumination feature in Unity’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), along with the Unity Profiler and Timeline to overcome the lighting challenges they faced in building Projekt Z: Beyond Order.
Justin Miersch, Studio Lead and Founder, 314 Arts
314 Arts is a very small studio based in Germany with four employees right now and 10 more contractors working constantly on Projekt Z: Beyond Order.
Projekt Z: Beyond Order is an atmospheric first-person zombie co-op shooter set in World War II with base-building elements. The main goal for the game was really to create something different, because most of the zombie games are pretty much the same.
So what we did is we tried to mix multiple game design ideas from other games in the zombie genre. There's also some that offer base-building, but not a lot of other shooting mechanics. So we thought, okay, maybe we mix those and then we have a great game design in general for Project Z: Beyond Order.
Overcoming technical challenges
The biggest technical challenge for us was getting the lighting right. Unity offers a lot of stuff already out-of-the-box, so the main goal then was to just make everything look great with the tools that we had.
We took multiple steps to overcome the lighting challenges. The first one was basically to check out what options we had. Should we use the adaptive probe volumes? Should we go into baked lighting? Or should we use Screen Space Global Illumination?
We later decided because the game is fully real-time and we needed this real-time global illumination, we decided to go and choose Screen Space Global Illumination. And from there, it was more like an iterative process of going back and forth and checking if everything looked exactly as we wanted it to.
Tooling for performant visuals
HDRP was helpful with multiple things. For example, Screen Space Global Illumination helped us a lot and it's also the most performant way. If you look, for example, for other options on the Asset Store, we think that Screen Space Global Illumination from Unity had the best performance, in our opinion. We made some smaller tests, so we used that one, and without it, I think the game would look way worse.
One of the main aspects where the Unity Profiler helped us a lot was finding out that the shadow performance was the main issue in our project, since we're kind of always GPU-bound in our project. So we looked at the Unity Profiler, we saw what the issue was, and just after seeing what the Profiler told us, we created our own shadow performant tool to get rid of the issue of the shadows. That was one thing that saved us a lot of time.
It gave us 50% more performant lighting, and that was basically just caused by using the Profiler, seeing what the issue is, and basically executing.
The timeline was super helpful for us. We used the it for our cinematics in the game between every mission, and even the basic features, like for example, activating lights or animating them accordingly so you have nice artificial lights.
It's just beautiful and it helped us a lot, together with all the other things that we built. We used that a lot even though we have, of course, the moon, the sun, and the normal props that also illuminate the world. But, sometimes, you have that dark little spot that you still want to light up a little bit more, and then we used artificial lights for it. I think this is really a key point of getting to the visuals that we have right now.
Looking into the future
I think what is the most exciting thing about Ray Tracing is that it is, of course, real-time. I think every developer just loves iterating as fast as possible, and it's of course also super beautiful to see everything super clean, super clear.
It's just awesome, and that's the reason why we're also looking into implementing Ray Tracing later on.
We just want to focus right now on screen space reflections, and then we really want to go into Ray Tracing, because it's such a beautiful technique that we also want to use.
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