2020 - A Retrospective

The year 2020 was a tough year for most of us and at the same time -by far- the most successful year for the company since we started. I know we say this since we started the retrospectives, so let me explain why it was our most successful year a bit more.
The obvious measurement of success is revenue and profits, but the more interesting question is why they increased. We built more loyal customer relationships with integrity and trust with more companies than ever before. We have now colleagues who are since a long time with the company. In other words, we grew our own senior and principal level over the years. We also started to distribute more responsibility in-between our senior people and installed more ways to let them benefit from the profits. We are hoping to continue our growth in projects, people, and profits this way.

One of the reasons for our success is our open-source rendering framework "The Forge". It now runs in several AAA custom game engines, will run a business application framework on several hundred million mobile devices, and a lot more. Many conversations we have with hardware and software companies start around this framework. It helps to test drivers, define API standards, and -most important-, ships games :-)

https://github.com/ConfettiFX/The-Forge

We can also see that people use it for teaching computer graphics, to build game engines for their side projects, and some of the users surprise us with their ingenuity and what they are doing with it.

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who worked with us and / or recommended us. Thanks for your trust!

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War
https://www.callofduty.com/blackopscoldwar
This year we contributed to the next Call of Duty game. We helped to optimize the console platforms for the launch and the first patch.

Activision Call of Duty (Future Mobile)
We are also helping to write a future mobile game engine for Call of Duty. It is exciting to see the Android / Vulkan run-time of The Forge cover high-end graphics on current high-end phones.

Big Box Population: ONE for Quest
http://www.populationonevr.com/
Over the last two+ years we helped several games to launch on the Oculus Quest platform. Population: ONE was the first one using the Unity game engine.

17-bit "Song in the Smoke" for Quest
We provided source code, tools and art asset optimizations to this UE4 based game.

Facebook Business Framework
One of our forward looking projects, is redefining how we render business applications on mobile phones. This project is running now nearly since a year and we consider it one of the most exciting ones. Running The Forge on 100s of million mobile devices will make it hopefully the most used rendering framework.

Vitei Powder
We were also helping with a Quest version of the following game:
https://twitter.com/giles/status/1117321130606333957?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw/

Quest SDK Examples
We also did some tools development for the Quest SDK. We integrated Crashlytics, Breakpad, and Analytics into Unity and UE4 and for the Quest SDK. We wrote a description on how to use them and how to use deep-linking.

Google Stadia Internal Technology
We continued from last year to help Google to develop technology that allows to bring more games over to their streaming service.

Google Stadia Vulkan Test Framework
To test the Vulkan drivers for Stadia, there is a testing framework. We helped to write more driver tests to make the drivers more stable.

Primal Space / Concurrents
https://www.primalspacesystems.com/
We helped them to develop and optimize a UE4 plugin that helps streaming game content in an "intelligent" way, predicting what needs to be streamed next.

Qualcomm VR SDK

When you develop XR experiences for Qualcomm hardware, you will use the Qualcomm XR SDK. We are improving this SDK since more than a year focusing on performance and quality. We also enable support of future hardware.

Five Nights port to Quest / Steel Wool Games

We ported the game "Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted" to the Quest for Steel Wool Games / Facebook Technologies.

Supergiant Games

We are working with Supergiant since 2014. One of the on-going challenges was that their run-time was written in C#. At the beginning of 2019, we suggested to help them in building a new cross-platform game engine in C/C++ from scratch with The Forge. The project started in April 2019 and the first version of this new engine launched in May this year. Hades was then released for Microsoft Windows, MacOS, and Nintendo Switch on September 17 2020. The game can run on all platforms supported by The Forge.

The year 2021 will see more console platforms running the game.

Bethesda
We had a great time helping Bethesda with various game engine related tasks.

If you are interested in reading our previous retrospectives, please check out the following links:

2021 a retrospective
2020 a retrospective
2019 a retrospective
2018 a retrospective
2017 a retrospective
2016 a retrospective
2015 a retrospective
2014 a retrospective
2013 a retrospective