IKINEMA Interviews Sumo Digital on the Production of Crackdown 3

FARNHAM, UK, 19 February 2019 - Today, we are delighted to announce IKINEMA's exclusive video interview with Sumo Digital's Senior Producer, Steve Lycett and members of his exceptional development team on the development of Crackdown 3, in time for its eagerly awaited US launch on Friday 15th February by Microsoft Studios.

The interview is a rich deep dive into the complexities of game development. The team share how they leveraged the powerful real-time games middleware, IKINEMA RunTime to unlock freedom for developers and artists, as well as the player.

Continued...

Agents level up in game to become physically larger, only a single animation set is required

regardless of gender or body proportions when using IKINEMA RunTime.

Right through from producer, animator, artist, designer, programmer to quality assurance-we hear how Sumo Digital's full development cycle benefitted using the RunTime technology. Paramount was its use for their dynamic 'ledging' system where the character's hands and feet grip ledges of tall buildings, organic matter or objects to shimmy across, climb and jump up or down vertical surfaces. RunTime enabled accurate engagement of limbs with these dynamic ledges and objects, to give players the feeling of connecting to the game world in a far more believable and tactile way, as well as the freedom to locomote superheroes in and around Crackdown's very complicated open-world sandbox environments.

For instance, Character Programmer, Steven Harten asks us to imagine the time investment by designers and artists to tag each individual mesh that's grabbable by an Agent. Here Steven describes, "IKINEMA has allowed us to generate this dynamic system that offloads all that work into this code driven pipeline-we could have eaten up at least a couple of years' worth of work just chasing down these bugs".

Sumo Digital walks us through integration and support experience where IKINEMA RunTime worked straight out of the box, up and running within one day, plus compatibility with their existing animation library-even heavily reducing animation sets. In Steve Lycett's words, "Games are only going to get more complicated, so when you find a good tool to bring to arsenal-you tend to come back to it".

IKINEMA is set to attend the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March and are inviting studios to meet and learn how they too can empower their teams with modern workflows and accelerate development time to produce convincing high fidelity character motion for all game styles. Join award winning studios that have already integrated IKINEMA RunTime, the likes of Avalanche Studios, Deep Silver Dambuster Studios, Insomniac Games, NCSoft Corporation, NetEase Network, Rare, Square Enix, 343 Industries, and Warner Bros. Games.

GDC early bird bookings:

Victor Puente | Senior Client Partner | V.Puente@IKINEMA.com

IKINEMA RunTime procedurally animates 3D characters of any shape or size during real-time, resulting in avatars that respond with superior fidelity to the world around them, producing highest levels of life-like and natural movement with full-body immersion in VR. The middleware enables studios to significantly reduce animation assets to slash production time and cost.

Download your FREE copy of the IKINEMA RunTime Demo Package.

Product availability: RunTime includes RunTime VR extension. Available in two license tiers: Studio and Indie. License choices available on www.IKINEMA.com. Evaluation pack request email, Store@IKINEMA.com. Full dedicated support included with Studio licenses. Integrates with Unreal Engine 4, Unity, and custom game engines. Available for platforms PC Windows, Xbox One, PS4, Switch, iOS, Android, and Linux.

Last updated: Feb 17, 2019 at 09:10 pm CST