Broken Games

Broken Games is a small, ambitious independent game development company based in Berlin, Germany. Their flagship game, Rise of Legions, is a multiplayer RPG available for the Windows platform. Co-founders Tobias and Martin focus on bringing people together through game playing with games that easily accessible to new gamers but provide sufficient challenges and depth for hardcore audiences.

“Even with today’s optimizations, we estimate that Delphi is still four times faster than other language compilers.”

Tobias Tenbusch, CTO/Co-Founder

Challenge

Build a multiplayer online game that meets demanding performance standards, with a customized game engine, that can be maintained by a small independent development team.

Solution

When founders Martin Lange and Tobias Tenbusch started their independent game company, they searched for a development environment and programming language with high performance, fast compile times, and superior code readability and maintenance. They found their answer with Delphi®.

Breaking into the gaming industry as an independent studio can be challenging. Broken Games evaluated the Unity engine but determined it was too expensive and reliability was a concern. Broken Games ultimately chose to develop its own game engine in Delphi. This decision gave the developers control over their own update and bug fix cycles while reducing costs associated with external pricing models. Access to the source code allows their development team to quickly resolve bugs, while writing it in the elegant Delphi language reduced the learning curves for new tools.

The Results

In January 2019, an early release of “Rise of Legions” attracted over 100,000 subscribers. The game is free to join, but includes in-game monetization through upgrades like skins, game progress, and more.

Broken Games evaluated several options for custom font rendering in the game to balance quality, ease of implemementation and availability. DirectWrite provided the the font quality they were looking for, but implementation required a high level of effort. FireMonkey (FMX)’s source code provided the solution by encapsulating DirectWrite for the Windows platform. Broken Games used FMX’s TCanvas and TTextLayout to draw their custom fonts and then copy the image data into a DirectX 11 texture to display on-screen. FMX provides Broken Games with options for future and additional platform support.