RAPID is a 24 month project to develop a prototype toolkit to assist, improve and accelerate the development of video games by the application of procedural methods for automatic and semi-automatic content generation and performance tailoring. The toolkit will contain components to assist the design and population of worlds for high-quality games; automatically to generate new levels and gameplay for mobile games; automatically to prevent the creation of impossible or unrealisable designs; and tools that automatically match the environment geometry complexity to platform capacity and bandwidth. The video games industry is at a crossroads. At the top end of the market, the cost of developing and marketing ‘AAA’ games can match movie blockbusters. At the other end, lowcost and ‘free-to-play’ mobile games have become hugely popular, but creating the new levels to retain player engagement is very difficult to do affordably and developers struggle to make money. UK studios are squeezed at both ends of the market. RAPID will result in new algorithms for procedural content development, new procedural approaches to game delivery and gameplay, a modular procedural software toolkit (to support the creation of AAA and mobile games by Rebellion, and services for the procedural development of games and gameplay by other companies, including micro studios. We plan to offer a free, basic automatic service, and a premium paid service, in which Rebellion will run a developer’s plan through the full procedural engine and toolkit to deliver a detailed mobile games level or high quality environment. Rebellion is one of Europe’s leading games developers and publishers. It is the studio behind numerous hit games (including Sniper Elite V2, Sniper Elite: Zombie Army, Aliens vs Predator, The Simpsons, and Star Wars Battlefront: Renegade Squadron), a successful publisher of comics and books, and a producer of cross-platform entertainment media.

ASAP is a two-year project to research, develop and demonstrate a new pipeline, tools and processes for rendering and reviewing CGI and video-based media, at appropriate levels of quality for real-time, interaction-time and near-line use cases. The results will facilitate the cross-media creation and use of assets for film, TV and games and compress the present stages of preproduction, production and postproduction, eliminating the need to re-create assets from scratch for different uses. The project will advance the state of the art in asset preparation, scalable dynamic rendering and shaders, production visualisation, lighting interaction, real-time combination of 2D and 3D assets, and the unification of media processing pipelines. It will deliver a range of new tools, applications, software and production services. The project is a large-scale cross-industry initiative by a consortium comprising the UK’s largest VFX company (DNeg), three world-leading SMEs specialising in media technology creation (FilmLight, Ncam and The Foundry), and the UK’s leading independent games developer (Rebellion).

The idea of this project is to create technology to accelerate the processes of designing and constructing video game levels. The project is aimed at the early stages of design, when ideas are being iterated and frequent changes to the game level being made. Unlike fields such as architectural visualisation, the world of a game is an active place, as it hosts many other elements: gameplay mechanics, characters, physics objects, etc. to interact with. Evaluating a game level involves all these elements, which is why level design is not simply a matter of building geometry. The outputs from the project comprise: a procedural tool that can create and edit 2D plans for level layouts, using a mixture of ‘synthesis by example’ with user-controlled operations; a tool that takes these 2D plans and generates initial 3D geometry; a final tool that allows direct editing of that 3D geometry, together with full integration with the game engine so there is zero-gap between how the level appears in the editor, and how the player will see it. This kind of WYSIWYG editing is a gold standard when creating content, and avoids costly cycling between applications to achieve the desired results.

Awaiting Public Summary