Serious Games Studio

Developer Profile: Serious Games Interactive.

Serious Games Interactive is in the middle of producing a large serious game about the Israel/Palestine conflict, aimed towards schools and the consumer market.

Who are you?

I am the game director at Serious Games Interactive. Before that I was the guy who did Unity's shader system and a co-founder of OTEE and producer of GooBall.

It's my job to make sure that all the different pieces fit together to fit the project vision – everything from nitpicking about texture work to making sure that our in-game cutscenes deliver the right emotional impact.

As one of the original Unity developers, I occasionally get to do some low-level heavy-duty programming.

What is Serious Games Interactive about?

We make games that are for more than just pure fun or pleasure. Games that appeal to a wide audience, including viewers of Discovery Channel documentaries. To appreciate how big the potential for this is one needs only consider the recent commercial success of several documentaries.

What's your current project?

We're working on a game about the Israel/Palestine conflict. Here, the player takes on the role of a journalist covering the conflict. The goal is to let the player experience both sides of this conflict. This is something that can only be done properly in an interactive media. Thanks to Unity, we can deliver a rich environment that gets the feel of the dirty street hustle of east Jerusalem, and still lets us get into close-ups on the in-game characters so you can see their facial expressions (which is an important gameplay element).

What does your art pipeline consist of?

Besides Unity, we use Maya, Photoshop and ZBrush. We pretty much have the same pipeline as most next-gen game studios use.

Everything gets assembled in Unity. The different people working on the project have complete responsibility of integrating their work and checking out the in-game results. As we're 5 people working on this, the streamlined process is very important.

What is the status of the production

We have been in production for 9 months, with a further 9 months before we have to ship a complete game of commercial quality. There's five people working on the game itself, plus external audio and music, plus a panel of experts making sure we get our facts straight.

So far everything's been above expectations. We have a Unity source code license, and have been able to extend Unity in a number of ways. While the traditional Unity can be embedded in a web browser, we have turned the whole thing upside down and are embedding a web-browser inside unity.

Basically, Unity allows us to focus on creating our game. We can pick the best tools for each job and it all just works.

What are your biggest obstacles?

Apart from having access to and modifying the source code, we also function as a continual testing bed for new Unity features. The new character animation system was given a thorough beating by us prior to going out in the official unity version. Having access to the bleeding edge source code does mean that you bleed occasionally ;-)