Bringing a multiplatform game to web with ULTRAHORSE

How do you take a 4K multi-gigabyte game and reduce it to tens of megabytes for the web? In this video, Anatolijs Ropotovs, CEO and cofounder at ULTRAHORSE, offers insights on how the team decreased SquadBlast’s loading time and build size for the web.

Transcript

Anatolijs Ropotovs, CEO and Cofounder, ULTRAHORSE

My name is Anatolijs Ropotovs, and I'm the CEO and cofounder of ULTRAHORSE.

Our studio started at the peak of lockdown, and we really wanted to build a distributed game studio remote-first.

We've been inspired by great, amazing titles, side-scroller games, and the games that we've built in the past.

We have quite a history of using Unity. We've built many games before at our previous games companies. We built Guns of Boom, which is a multiplayer shooter that reached over 50 million players before any other game on mobile came into the FPS game genre.

So for us, building SquadBlast with Unity was a no-brainer.

Approaching web differently

We come from the age of side-scroller shooters. We wanted to reimagine that for the modern age of multiplayer shooters, and that's how we started.

In the end, it's a run-and-gun shoot-'em-up class-based shooter game, and it's all on a 2D plane, as opposed to all the 3D first-person shooters out there. So, I think it's kind of fresh and feels old school at the same time.

Why is the web so exciting? I think it's all about coming back to its roots. You know, all the online game portals of the previous decade. The web is a place where new games are born for the players, where you have the freedom to experiment, and can update the games five times a day.

You don't have to go through approvals from the platforms. You can craft your own new business models. The web provides a whole new opportunity. I feel like it's a new way to go to market.

For us, going to the web was figuring out whether we can make a game that’s a little bit different, if we can be more agile in development, and roll things out quicker.

Optimizing meticulously

I don't think we ended up compromising too much. We just kept optimizing.

We figured out that Addressables are the way to load the assets in a more lazy way. That means that you can get some of the pictures in an asynchronous way. They will load a little bit later.

Then we figured out how to introduce LOD, level of detail. So, first, we load really small, blurry images, and gradually, they load in better quality over time.

This is something that we didn't have to do on other platforms, such as consoles, where you download gigabytes of content before you play the game.

For mobile, mobile web, and desktop web, we started doing those tricks, and I think it lets you get into the game quicker.

You can load the game faster. In the end, it's a huge win for our players that they can get into the game in as little as five to 10 seconds, depending on the platform.

When we came to mobile web and web, it looks like it's a 2D game, so you think it's going to be that simple. But 2D games have a lot of sprites, particles, animations, large-sized backgrounds, and so many different parallax effects and intermission screens.

For our game, we had to optimize and rethink a lot of things for mobile web, not just the texture formats. We had to decrease the sizes of things and we had to rethink the compression. So, not a lot of sacrifice, but a lot of meticulous optimization, changes to the pipelines, and rethinking of how we were going to produce new content moving forward, so it's going to work across all platforms out there.

Meeting players where they are

It's been quite a journey. We originally envisioned the game as a PC-and-console game and built the Xbox version first. We then realized the game is quite accessible, so we tried our best and brought the game to mobile, which was a whole new endeavor.

With all of the efforts that we kept putting into the optimization of the game – every single megabyte that we shaved off from the loading, every single millisecond that we improved the loading times, every single megabyte of RAM and video RAM, we realized that if it's on mobile maybe we can just take another leap and try to get it onto the web.

It was a very ambitious goal, you know. 4K multi-gigabyte game, down to hundreds of megabytes on mobile, down to tens of megabytes on the web.

We finally got there – first to the desktop web, and now, with Unity 6 and all of the new tools that it's bringing, we are now live for mobile web.

Play SquadBlast on the web. Find more Made with Unity titles on our official Steam Curator Page, and visit unity.com/resources for more content featuring Unity developers.