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Helping to set Romero Games’s Empire of Sin up for success

September 24, 2020 in Games | 4 min. read
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Hundreds of game studios – from skeleton-crew indies to big-budget AAAs – turn to Unity Customer Success Services to ensure that their projects are built on strong and stable foundations. Renowned strategy games publisher Paradox Interactive relies on a Unity Success Plan to empower its development partners to deliver amazing game experiences.  

Here, we’ll explore how Paradox Interactive’s access to Unity support has helped Romero Games to create their hotly anticipated upcoming title, Empire of Sin.

Delivering on big ambitions

The iconic team at Romero Games chose Unity to bring the roaring ’20s to life in their gangland strategy game Empire of Sin. This ambitious gameplay concept is built on storytelling inspired by the underworld of prohibition-era Chicago including exploration, real-time empire building, resource management, and turn-based combat. Romero Games chose to build this complex strategy game in Unity for numerous reasons, including speedy iterations, the ability to develop custom tools and workflows, and the extensibility of the engine.

“Unity’s fast iteration time is one of its most important features for the programmers – being able to make a code change of any size and not needing to worry about compile or link times,” explains Keith O’Conor, the game’s technical director. “The Editor scripting abilities are also a huge advantage. We have been able to make many custom tools for world building and easily develop the workflows specific to our game.” 

But even with the right engine and an experienced team, every project encounters roadblocks and setbacks along the way. Happily, Romero Games’s publisher Paradox Interactive is committed to providing developers with every available resource to achieve their goals, including Unity Integrated Success Services (ISS).

Comprehensive support that removes obstacles

A publisher of top-tier strategy games, Paradox Interactive offers comprehensive Unity support to the creative development teams they work with. “Games publishing is complex,” explains Gustav Groth, Paradox Interactive’s product manager for Empire of Sin. “If I were to summarize what we do, this is how I would do it: We enable developers to execute their vision. Developing a game is difficult enough, and we remove external barriers from developers so they can focus on making the games they’re passionate about. We achieve that by providing a plethora of services such as market knowledge, financing, partner contacts, and player insights.” 

Because Paradox understands the challenges of development, this seasoned publisher strives to remove obstacles so that developers can focus on making games. Paradox subscribes to Unity Publisher Support in order to strategically allocate resources to their partners. To power Empire of Sin, they gave Romero Games access to Unity’s Integrated Success Services (ISS) support, which provided the dev team with a direct line to Unity developers and experts for accelerated resolution of issues.

Providing direct access to Unity experts

A key benefit to the ISS program is the Developer Relationship Manager, or DRM. Acting as an extension of the Romero Games team, the DRM offers tailored support based on their detailed understanding of the project, studio, and business goals. As Romero Games’s advocate within Unity, they ensure resources are applied where they are most needed and provide guidance in best practices. The DRM helps to resolve issues quickly and sends logged bugs to a dedicated QA team for priority triage and reproduction. When critical issues arise, the DRM helps to expedite their resolution and ensures that the development team has everything they need to stay productive. 

In addition to providing regular health checks, ISS support includes an in-depth audit in the form of a Project Review, a deep dive into the project’s tech to identify elements that could be optimized to improve performance. Conducted in-studio over the course of two days, a Unity expert engineer digs into the code to flag risks and provide suggestions for improvement. For Empire of Sin, having a project review early in development helped to strengthen the foundations of the game to avoid wasting valuable resources and time in later phases.

When questions arise, the ability to reach out to an expert at the right moment makes all the difference. Romero Games’s close relationship with Unity through ISS allows the team to concentrate on making the game rather than troubleshooting problems, ensuring that they can continue to develop Empire of Sin on time and at quality. 

 


 

Even a team of highly experienced developers can benefit from in-depth support. Check out our case study for the full story on how Unity Success Plans helped Paradox Interactive and Romero Games to remain on target.

Want to learn more? Dig into the 5 ways that Unity Success Plans help studios reach their goals. To find out which success plan is right for you,  get in touch with our team.

September 24, 2020 in Games | 4 min. read

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