We are most excited to show you our new engine.

The throwback version of Grafighters that many of you may remember was built in Flash. It was basically just a bunch of images rotating around a screen. You couldn’t control them, it only allowed for two characters on the screen at a time, and it only worked in a web browser. Clearly It was pretty cutting edge stuff.

Our imaginations were constantly getting pwnd by the limitations of our engine, so we decided to take the time to fix that. This video shows some of the fun things that Grafighters are now capable of.

If you like words better than moving images, you’re weird, but here you go:
- Full 3D, or 2D, or 2.5D or a crazy combination of all of them!
- Deforming characters and texture scaring.
- Realtime shadows, cameras, and lighting
- Physics on physics
- Motion retiming (for slow motion effects)
- Particle effects
- Works on tons of platforms

What this means for you is that we will be producing better games, at a quicker pace, on a variety of platforms.

The engine we are using is Unity 3D, but we have added our own custom plugin sauce to make it Grafighters compatible. The tricky technical solution we had to solve, was how correctly integrate our character data into the Unity animation pipeline at runtime. This means that characters have to be created procedurally, their images, joint structure, bind poses, skin weights, everything, all without recompiling. That was a fun task.

We also added more bones to the skeleton behind the scenes which allow for a bendy torso piece, which is responsible for all the hip shaking you see above.

Above all Unity gives us infinite options for controlling your characters (your most requested feature) so stay tuned for some game specific announcements.

You can read more about Unity 3D here: http://unity3d.com/
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/61657912