GameCore Takes on Unity in the 3D Browser Space

LOS ANGELES -- While much has been written about game engine company Unity and its impact on social games, a new competitor is out to prove that 3D social gaming and cross-platform development is the future. Helios Interactive CEO Rave Mehta, who is speaking Thursday in Los Angeles at the 3D Gaming Summit, talks about his company’s new cross-platform development toolset, GameCore, and how it could change the dimension of how casual players embrace social games not only on PC and Mac, but on Xbox 360, iPhone and iPad.

IndustryGamers: How have you seen the videogame industry evolve recently?

Rave Mehta: The nature of what we call a videogame experience has changed dramatically in the past few years.  The market has split into the large Hollywood-style AAA releases for consoles that are more and more life-like, which require larger and larger teams, and huge investments in time and capital to produce. On the other side, as AAA games have become more expensive and difficult to produce, an ever-growing gap in the market has appeared that is slowly being filled by smaller, innovative developers producing games for an ever-growing list of platforms. Nintendo took the first swing at this with the Wii -- focusing on simple, fun, cartoony, non-realistic games that engage a different audience who were looking for more of a social experience.  The success of the Wii, the phenomena of social gaming and the popularity of the more advanced mobile devices are some of the early results of this new era of gaming. The simple fact that a large percentage of people that play games on Facebook (as an example), do not identify themselves as gamers says a huge amount about the nature of the changing face of video game experiences today.

IG: What role has this migration to social games played in your company?

RM: While we love playing the next big game as much as anyone, this shift is something that we noticed many years ago and began developing a custom 'rapid game creation' system which has evolved over several major iterations into the GameCore technology we have today.  One of our primary goals is to streamline the development process and make it easier for anyone -- hobbyist, student, professional or studio -- to create fun and compelling games.

IG: What is GameCore?

RM: GameCore is, first and foremost, an integrated development environment for producing 3D games.  GameCore provides a true end-to-end solution for producing games that can be delivered seamlessly across a wide range of platforms. We have the full range of high-end features that developers and gamers expect for modern games, including real-time physics, morph targets, advanced animation support, 64 bit HDR rendering and other advanced post-processing effects.  On Windows, we support both DirectX and OpenGL, and OpenGL for the Mac. GameCore also provides a complete server-side implementation as well that includes account management, online user profiles, leaderboards, cloud-based save games as well as a robust NAT traversal and master server system for online networked games. We also have custom server-side implementations that provide seamless integration into Facebook, as well. Integrations for other popular social networking sites will be rolled out over the coming months.

IG: What types of games will we be seeing on Facebook that use this tech?

RM: GameCore allows developers to rapidly iterate and produce content. Helios is focused on producing seed proof of concept games -- the first example of which is the Truck Off monster truck racing game -- that both showcase the kinds of games that are possible on these platforms and also provide complete, polished and professional games that are fun to play.  By creating these games ourselves internally, we’ve been able to easily identify and improve the development process and add improvements to the technology that our licensees can benefit from.

IG: How long did it take to make Truck Off?

RM: To give you an idea of how long it took to produce a multi-player 3D social game like Truck Off compared to some of the larger 2D Facebook games, at GDC developers from Zynga mentioned that FarmVille's initial development took 5 weeks with 15-20 people to complete prior to launch.  A small team of five produced Truck Off in roughly 3 weeks, including developing the custom Facebook integration.  We feel that this ability to produce sophisticated 3D games rapidly will completely change the dynamic of what is possible on the social gaming platforms. Additionally, many of these proof of concept games will also be made available to our developer community as game templates that can be dissected and used as a basis for creating their own games. 

IG: Can you talk about how your technology works with cross-platform gaming?

RM: The biggest advantage to developing with GameCore is the fact that you can truly develop once, and deliver your game to multiple platforms. This is a promise that has been touted many times in the past, but when it came down to the reality of actually developing games, the so-called 'cross-platform' capabilities often required developers to rebuild their games essentially on multiple platforms separately. 

With GameCore, the game that you deliver on multiple platforms is the exact same content, the exact same gameplay. As a more dramatic example, in our internal tests for the Xbox 360, we literally export the PC version, copy the data onto the 360 and it just works.  GameCore handles all of the platform-specific requirements automatically under the hood. There is no real porting involved in jumping from one platform to another. Create a PC game and decide later on to ship a Mac version and it's all of a couple of mouse clicks. The same goes for development - you can have some developers on Windows, others on the Mac all working on the same project. Our objective is to provide developers with the freedom to take their games wherever their audience may be - whether it's on a PC, Mac, Web, Social gaming platform or mobile devices. 

IG: Will you be bringing social games to Xbox 360?

RM: Absolutely!  We’ve done technical tests with the Xbox 360 and games can seamlessly port to this platform the same as any others. We do have plans to do proper ports to the consoles and believe GameCore will help solve some of the cross-platform development issues that teams run into. On the Xbox 360 side, Microsoft has a history of not allowing games on their console to communicate with “the outside world,” but with their new 3 Screens approach that they showcased at GDC this year, hopefully this will begin to change for upcoming games. Technically, there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't have a GameCore game running simultaneously across the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PC, Mac, Facebook and iPhone/iPad, literally playing the exact same game. 

IG: Would gamers be able to play games across PC to the new iPad? What do you see that device adding to games?

RM: For online gaming, you'd probably want to make sure that you are using the WiFi connection on the iPad for an optimal online experience, but yes, most definitely. When you start to get into the more unique devices such as the iPad, I can easily see that developers could come up with equally unique ways to use them, particularly in online games. For example, imagine a dungeon-exploring multiplayer RPG where the 'dungeon master' is using the iPad (with a drag-and-drop interface) to spawn enemy encounters, spring traps etc. on the other players that are playing on other devices (PC, Mac, Web, Facebook) in first or third person adventure gameplay modes.  As well, a number of online shooters today have commander modes where one player's role is to drop reinforcements, control artillery, etc. The iPad would be ideal for this kind of interface.

IG: Sounds interesting. Thanks for your time.