PlatinumGames is making a brand new in-house engine to power its next generation of high-speed action games.
It’s hard to think of a game developer that’s been more successful at making action-packed titles than PlatinumGames. Bayonetta, Vanquish, NieR: Automata, and Astral Chain are all great examples of what PlatinumGames has been able to achieve all on their own.
Much of that success can be owed to their insistence in using their own game engine developed in-house, but that engine is starting to show its age. It needs to be replaced so that Platinum can develop for next-gen consoles, so that’s exactly what they’re doing.
PlatinumGames recently opened a brand new studio in Tokyo and along with that also posted several interviews with key members of their team. One of those interviews involved checking in with the developers currently working on the new engine, tentatively called “PlatinumEngine”, to see how they were going about building an engine from scratch.
The first question asked was probably the most obvious one: why bother with making an engine at all? Unreal 4 and Unity are both widely available and commonly used in today’s titles, but according to developer Wataru Ohmori, “We found that they were lacking some features that we needed.”
One of those features is ease of use. Platinum’s titles are all high-velocity, action-packed romps with characters performing maneuvers that seem impossible, but look absolutely amazing in-game. To do that, programmers and artists have to “try things out with their creations,” says Ohmori, so making the engine easy to understand and use was a paramount concern.
The new engine also doesn’t just focus on sweet visual effects, either. PlatinumEngine will take a more holistic approach to game making that takes many other aspects of a game into consideration that go beyond merely looking good.
“Don’t take that to mean that we aren’t giving graphical performance its due,” added programmer Tsuyoshi Odera. “We just think that there are other elements that are every bit as crucial to making truly engaging, AAA titles, and we want to give them as much emphasis.”
The new engine will be able to handle a wide variety of graphical styles, from photorealism to cartoony cel-shading. Platinum currently has about six or seven people working on the new engine, but as Ohmori notes, “We could use a few more…”
So if you’re a game engineer looking to move to Japan, consider PlatinumGames. They’re hiring in Tokyo.
Source: PlatinumGames, Gematsu
