28 April 2014
This case study, by Frima Studio, describes how Adobe's products were used to develop the multiplayer game, Lightbringers.
Bringing the team’s vision to life, with real-time multiplayer across devices, hundreds of characters with shadows, dynamic deformable ground, and a fully-lit environment would not have been possible without the support of Adobe’s engineers. Early on in the Stage3D lifecycle, they listened to the developers’ needs and worked on features that really matter to us, such as full-screen support, texture samplers, and dynamic vertex buffer.
Lightbringers is powered by IceField, Frima’s proprietary 3D engine; but under the hood, Adobe’s Stage3D does most of the heavy lifting by, for instance, reducing state change and keeping the API call overhead to a minimum. The ubiquity of the framework saved us a lot of time while developing for multiple platforms. Things like DirectX and OpenGL context loss event and checks for hardware capabilities were all supported out-of-the-box.
A game like this one requires a lot of native functionalities, such as supporting OBB extensions for Android, or in-apps purchases and push notifications. Adobe provides a way to access native mobile functionalities through the use of native extensions. In fact, we are using over half a dozen extensions, available through Adobe’s partners or AIR developers.
“Prototyping gameplay, testing and iterating using Adobe ActionScript3 is very fast. We started the initial prototype a while back, and I’m still using AS3 to iterate on my next project.”
-Thierry Boulanger, Lead Gameplay Programmer, Frima Studios.
“We’re currently developing a next-gen console game, and Adobe Flash is an important part of our art pipeline.”
-Jean-Philippe Doiron, Director of Technology, Frima Studios.
“Adobe AIR allowed us to target all of our platforms without the need for porting. Even the iOS submission went flawlessly.”
-Luc Beaulieu CTO, Frima Studios.
The following products were used to build Lightbringers:
For more information, see http://light-bringers.com/.