2015 Retrospective

Introduction

As the year winds to a close, we wanted to reflect on 2015, outline the exciting projects we worked on and thank all of you out there who support us.

In the nearly seven years of Confetti’s existence, this was by far the most exciting, most successful and most colorful year (I know we said this the last two years, but it is true :-) ).

This year we started a new tools department, grew again out of our office space while still having the challenge of finding more space, worked with the coolest projects in the industry and established our office in Europe in Breda, Netherlands to serve our European customers better.

This is also the first year, where we can see the effect of what we call “third-generation” recommendations. We worked with a company in 2010, the person we worked with moved to the next company and recommended us and then from this company someone moved on and recommended us again to the third customer. Thanks for all the awesome recommendations!!

Red Giant

We are a middleware, consulting, & service company for the game and movie industry.

This year, we worked with Red Giant on future real-time rendering of high-quality post-processing effects for movie post production.

Undead Labs

Our friends at Undead Labs are one of our returning customers. This year, we helped them with various additions to their engine, including adding a new real-time skydome system with volumetric clouds.

Amazon Game Studios

For nearly two years, we have worked with Amazon Game Studios on their game engine. Creating new, especially next-gen, technologies for many hardware platforms never fails to excite us.

 

Transistor | Supergiant Games

This year, we helped to ship Transistor for iOS. This is an awesome game, and we enjoyed working with the super nice and talented team at Supergiant Games a lot!

Make sure to check out the game!

Superevil Megacorp | Vainglory

We also helped to launch Vainglory on the Android platform in the first months of the year. If you like to play a MOBA on a mobile platform, check it out. It was a joy to work with the super cool team at SuperEvil Mega Corp.

Dolby Vision

Dolby Vision is the new HDR standard for TVs & Monitors of the future. It’s very impressive to see these new TVs & Monitors in action. We wrote the Dolby Vision SDK and now support various game developers and hardware vendors in implementing it.

KIT in Karlsruhe

This year we also started a project with the famous German research center KIT in Karlsruhe.

Our relationship with these guys goes way back to the founding of this company. Carsten Dachsbacher has always been a member of our advisory board. We are hoping to publish the project we worked on as open-source very soon.

Not to spill the beans, but it has something to do with a next-gen rendering system; in other words, more lights and many more shadows compared to current rendering systems.

Qualcomm

Since nearly seven years, Qualcomm is a great customer and this year like every other year we worked on a few interesting new projects with them. Supporting a “tinkering” hardware platform was one of them. We also returned to the Qualcomm offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Activision | Call of Duty: Black Ops III

One of the few remaining IPs that we haven’t worked on in the last seven years was Call of Duty. We were painfully aware of this until we got the chance to finally work on Call of Duty: Black Ops III. We can now say we worked on many, if not most, of the big IPs in our industry.

Unannounced Projects

With the new rendering APIs available now, we are involved not only in designing those APIs on Microsoft’s Advisory Board and in the Khronos Group but also in frequently implementing them in game engines.

We worked on various game engines this year, implementing Metal, iOS, DirectX 12, and Vulkan PC & Mobile.

Middleware Packages

We also worked on a wide range of new tech that we developed in-house, for example, a next-gen rendering system that removes the memory bandwidth overhead of filling G-Buffers from the rendering equation.

Our middleware packages Aura, Ephemeris, and PixelPuzzle have evolved and are running even more efficiently on PC, PS4, and XBOX One. There is also a new middleware package on the horizon.

Stay tuned for even more exciting stuff!