Developed by Grab Games
Port to Quest by Freeform Labs
Status: Published to Oculus Quest store
Engine: Unreal/UE4
Version Control: SVN
Platform: Oculus Quest (mobile VR)
“Welcome to the Knockout League, a single player arcade style boxing game built from the ground up for Virtual Reality. Its intuitive gameplay involves moving and dodging with your body and 1:1 punch movement that lets you attack how you want without relying on buttons for main gameplay. Train up with various boxing drills to take on a crazy cast of characters with different fighting styles and gameplay in order to become the champion of the Knockout League!”
Freeform Labs was hired by Grab Games to port their popular VR title Knockout League from PC VR to Oculus Quest (mobile VR). We worked closely with Grab to modify and optimize the title while retaining its look and feel. Our work was accepted by Keywords QA, passed Oculus’ stringent performance testing, and was successfully shipped on time for its scheduled release.
Tech Artist
Much of the work I did was focused on analyzing, replacing, editing, and restructuring scene assets - and creating documentation for the team.
Optimization Analysis (Intel Analyzer) - Derived action plans for optimization based on data collection, comparison, and testing, which allowed us to focus our time and energy where it would be the most impactful. Used the Intel Graphics Performance Analyzers to capture and analyze scenes’ GPU costs (ms), and developed action plans to improve the most costly items, made those changes, and re-analyzed those scenes to verify results and plan what was next. Many of the items below were derived from these measurements. Other changes were made based on prior experience and best practices, especially if they were relatively quick to implement and had little-to-no impact on the visual fidelity of the game.
Restructured project - As with any game, asset and feature iteration can change the needs of the project’s set-up. We helped the devs clean-house. This enabled the engine to load more quickly, and allowed us to better navigate through the project’s assets, which saved time for each developer multiple times per day. It also made debugging easier for us.
Optimized characters - Reduced the amount of polygons and bone-weights used on each character in-engine. Customized values and heavily tested each asset to maximize savings without negatively impacting the visual quality.
Optimized particles - Simplified existing particle systems to retain the overall feel of the original. Stripped out very subtle emitters and duplicate emitters. Lowered resolution of images used. Reduced overdraw. Reduced location/range of particles. Switched to cheaper materials; made those cheaper materials as needed from scratch or via modification.
Created documentation - Wrote and compiled documentation covering our port process and best-practices.
Created optimized materials - Built in Unreal. Created a ‘multi-layered’ material that replaced all decal usage, while still allowing for in-engine authoring - it reduced transparency overdraw significantly, which in turn greatly improved frame-rate. The fidelity and look of the original scene was preserved, and we met our frame-rate requirements.
Switched assets to material instances - Created various broad-use parent materials, from which a host new material instances were derived and applied to existing assets. Increased performance for scene, props, and character assets.
Optimized 3D assets - Created texture atlases and implemented them using material instances. Edited or replaced various structural assets to reduce draw calls - Reduced polygons, removed unneeded faces or assets altogether, cleaned up UVs for baked lightmapping, and combined models.
Optimized scenes - Strategic asset combination, texture atlasing, cheaper materials, restructured lighting to use fewer dynamic lights and shadows, adjusted project settings for optimization.
