Updated 23 May, 2012, 6:39 pm IST

An Interview with Naked Sky Entertainment

09 May, 2007, 11:39 am IST | by Avinash Bali

We go behind the scenes with Naked Sky, the makers of the Xbox Live Arcade game, RoboBlitz.

An Interview with Naked Sky Entertainment

When you think of the Unreal 3 engine, the first thought that would probably creep up in your twisted little head would be chainsawing a Locust soldier in Gears of War closely followed by annihilating tangos in Rainbow Six Vegas. However, this engine has also been used to make a peaceful, fun loving arcade game that goes by the name of RoboBlitz and we’ve managed to track down Tian Mu, the CEO of Naked Sky Entertainment, the company responsible for the game and he gives us the lowdown on working with the Unreal engine and how they managed to fit something made with the Unreal 3 engine in merely 50 MB.

How was Naked Sky formed? Does the name have a "deeper" meaning?

Naked Sky Entertainment was formed in a tiny L.A. apartment by three close friends - Tian Mu, Joshua Glazer, and Sam Thibault - in 2002. We have always been passionate about games and technology and were ultimately pulled together by a compelling game concept that led to the founding of the company.

The name doesn’t really have a "deeper" meaning. Tian wanted the word "sky" because as the saying goes, the sky's the limit. However, every type of sky was taken - crystal sky, blue sky, electric sky, etc. As Tian was scrambling for an available adjective on a cloudless afternoon, an inspired Josh peeked out from behind his laptop and shouted "NAKED" before returning to his programming. The rest was history.

How was RoboBlitz born? What were your experiences working with the Unreal 3 engine? And how in God’s name did you manage to fit all of that in just 50 MB?

RoboBlitz evolved from a tech demo we did for Intel to showcase their dual core processor back in 2005. When the game was first demoed at the 2005 GDC, lots of people came up to us and asked when it was coming out. That was when we decided to make it into a full-fledge game. Of course, the art, design, and most of the code have changed completely since.

It was a great experience working with Unreal Engine 3. The engine itself is fantastic, and the guys at Epic are amazing, so whenever we had questions, they were there to help. However, UE3 was definitely not designed from scratch to support a 50MB game totally driven by physical animation. We had to make extensive changes to the architecture to get our characters up and running, and even more to make everything fit under the limit, so at times it was quite an adventure – especially because Epic was working on the engine at the same time we were modifying it.

As for fitting RoboBlitz in 50MB, it sure wasn’t easy. We had to integrate Allegorithmic’s ProFX (a procedural texture generation tool) into the Unreal Engine to generate our procedural textures, and then we had to implement our entire physical animation system to save on animation data (and enable unique gameplay), but even that wasn’t enough. We also had to loop our music just right, re-use as many assets as possible in creative ways, and crunch everything down with some very tight, yet fast, compression routines.