We've finally arrived. After a long and exhausting time planning the relaunch of our company we've finally flipped the switch and we're live.
drahtwerk will forever be a part of our history but from this day moving forward - we are MADE.
And boy do we love our new identity. Over the course of the past year we went through countless brainstorming sessions to find a new name for our company that has a classic but fresh feeling and a semantic to it that represents what we do.
This task is way much more difficult that it sounds, but I think we've got it right with MADE.
So what's with the semantic? MADE is an acronym and it stands for Mobile Applications and Digitial Entertainment - it perfectly describes our company and underlines that we're serious about our games.
The next step was designing a beautiful logo that fits the name and feels like a mixture between classic and "fresh, bold guys". Of course, the logo also had to work on print and black/white.
And again, the hunt for a logo was incredibly exhaustive - we've designed well over 50 logos until we were finally able to come up with our final logo.
As you're reading this blog post I guess you've probably already seen it in it's full glory, but what you probably didn't know is that our new logo has been designed with the famous golden ratio in mind.
Check out the image, it details how our new logo honors the principles of the golden ratio.
Of course we also had to redesign our website to match our company's new identity, so take a look around and tell us if you like it or if you find something awfully broken.
Check out some of the logo concepts that have never seen daylight, keep in mind that they'd look better in color :)
So much news! We also took the time to incorporate our company as a GmbH, that's the legal structure most big companies use so it's safe to say that we're big boys now.
So what else is coming up? Besides working on our company's rebirth we've spent a lot of time on our 3D engine tech called "drahtkern". drahtkern has been powering all our games and over the years it became a powerful tool with a complete toolchain that includes everything from level-editing to blender plugins. The whole engine is uber-crossplatform, it runs on nearly every platform that offers OpenGL and a C++ standard library. There are no dependencies on third-party UI frameworks (or any other SDK/framework) like GTK, QT or Cocoa to render the UI. Every button, label or widget is rendered through our engine with our own UI framework. Check out this screenshot of drahtkern with the editor visible. The game that's being edited is Type Kill. (Type Kill is not yet available)
And we've got even more in store: we've developed our own C# compiler+virtual machine (interpreter) that already supports the most important language features like delegates, automatic variables or automatic properties. Isn't that too slow? Well no, first off our compiler is not emitting MSIL but our own byte-code tuned for high-performance games. We've got lots of byte-code instructions that are designed for vector arithmetic. And what's probably more important is that we've also developed a native compiler that generates actual C++ source code whenever it's invoked from within the engine! So basically you've got your game running in drahtkern, developed in C#, you pull down the engine console and type "vmcompilenative" and BAM! it will generate actual c++ code for you to just drag into your xcode or visual studio project.
We're doing C# development in Xamarin Studio with network capable debugging support for our engine. And, well, if it's necessary we can go back to native C++ anytime or even mix C# with C++. And that's just the technical stuff that makes development with our engine so much more fun. Visually drahtkern delivers next-gen features like screen space ambient occlusion, realtime soft shadows, volumetric fog, rays of god and many other features as seen in AAA games. I'll hopefully find some time soon to go into detail with a cool feature and explain how we managed to bring it to life.