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ANIMUS: Revenant, The beginning of an apocalyptic game world

April 8, 2022 in Games | 5 min. read
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ANIMUS: Revenant was selected as Unity Pick, which recognizes the best project in the Games category at the 2021 MWU Korea Awards. This was achieved as a result of its immersive graphics, dynamic and exciting battle scenes, and stable operation across PC and console. In making ANIMUS: Revenant, the fourth and final act of the ANIMUS series, Tenbirds sought to showcase the full capabilities of the team in full. Their extraordinary determination has led to three major achievements with their latest title  - high-quality CG, an immersive storyline, and the series first entry into multiple platforms. Unity met with CEO Minwoo Ryu and Game Design Conceps/Writer Sue Kim to explore Tenbirds’ vision, their key to success, as well as the production process of ANIMUS: Revenant

Tenbirds is a team of 8 seasoned professionals whose experience in the Game industry with a minimum and maximum range of 13 to 21 years. While forming close relationships as they worked in different companies, they each felt the pull to make the game of their dreams. Although met with a range of creative outlets in their roles, they felt they could not realize all their dreams within their respective companies for various reasons. For some, their suggestions met with objections from the management due to seemingly minor, solvable issues. For others, the creative direction was restricted by intra-organizational perspectives. Their dissatisfaction only grew as time went by and finally, when their dissatisfaction reached a boiling point, the team members decided to found their own game company. That company was Tenbirds. They gathered to express their own “agony and suffering” through a fantasy game with an ever-dark game world. This motivation is also reflected in their team’s name, Tenbirds. Tapping into and and expressing dark feelings such as anger and sadness, was the seed they developed into the Revenant series.

When you are a part of a big organization, you don’t get to realize your dreams ever so often.

"Tenbirds" began as a team where we can do what we really wanted.

Minwoo Ryu, CEO, Tenbirds

 

Unity - the go-to single source multi-platform

Out of a desire to reach as many users as possible, Minwoo Ryu, CEO, planned to run their game on multiple platforms from the beginning. Since they had confirmed the possibility to expand from mobile to PC and console through previous titles, the Tenbirds team prepared to expand "Revenant" to multiple platforms to leverage all their accumulated know-how and take their game to another level. As a result, the "Revenant" was released successfully on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, Steam, and even PlayStation using a single source. 

It’s unusual for an Indie developer team to run their game on so many platforms, so we asked how this was made possible. Minwoo replied that they were pretty confident since their team included experienced experts from each field, but the key was Unity’s high multi-platform compatibility as well as a highly engaged community. In particular, dealing with different graphics, resources, and debugging issues of each platform is the biggest problem when expanding to multiple platforms - but since Unity has a highly engaged community, most issues could be solved quickly and easily,. With so much information about Unity many of their issues were solvable by means of a simple search and more complicated problems could be solved within the Unity forum. 

Alhough it is not visible on the game screen, the Tenbirds team developed and put to use an internal tool that combines mesh and texture to improve performance, and were also able to solve some restrictions on URP-based renderers for more vivid expression by modifying the code themselves. By actively utilizing Unity's strengths like this, the team was able to achieve the high quality of the game and expand to multiple platforms.   

When a problem arises, it is really not easy to find the answer right away. 

But Unity makes this possible. It’s so efficient and professional. 

Most of all, you can quickly find the answer in a dedicated, highly engaged community.

Minwoo Ryu, CEO, Tenbirds

 

An elaborate game world & high-quality narrative

The game world of Revenant is tightly sewn together. The entire narrative, relationship between the characters, the history of weapons, all the monsters are linked closely with each other.  With all the history in place, new users familiar with the pace of other action games left feedback that the development of the intro is somewhat slow and boring. Game Design Conceps/Writer Sue Kim said that the team values every opinion of their users, and that solving the above-mentioned point will likely become their next task. Rather than focusing on either story or action, the team is looking for ways to make both elements coexist while complementing each other. 

“There is no single element in the Revenant series that exists without a reason.

We paid so much attention to the whole narrative as well as every tiny link and detail.”

Sue Kim (Game Design Concepts/Writer), Tenbirds

A long-lasting future with Unity

Minwoo and Sue both agreed that it would be beneficial for many indie developers to know about the advantages of the Made with Unity Korea Awards and participate actively. In particular, they emphasized that the biggest benefit of the 2021 Unity MWU Korea Awards is receiving various feedback and seek other opportunities such as joint ventures and collaboration proposals. Furthermore, Minwoo said that Tenbirds’ main strength is that the team has much experience in using Unity, and added that the team is planning the next project with Unity's, as they’re impressed by steady and fast development pace of the engine and its tools.

“Being selected as Unity Pick was a big surprise. We were so proud to be selected, because we thought this shows that our desired game quality has been realized to some degree.”

Minwoo Ryu (CEO) & Sue Kim (Game Design Concepts/Writer), Tenbird

April 8, 2022 in Games | 5 min. read

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