We got the call from Microids for the first time. They’re a publisher that’s been active since 1985 and responsible for some of France’s cult classics like Syberia, Gear.Club, Still Life, and many others. Naturally, we wore more than excited to prove that we were up to the task for the challenge they had in store.

Noob - The Factionless is an RPG that follows four hardcore gamers who are on a quest to reach the Legendary Class in the Horizon MMORPG. While playing, you will be completing tasks both as the gamers themselves in real life and playing as their alter egos in the World of Horizon.

The game is a sweet homage to J-RPGs, “chibi” art, and creativity, as well as the community aspect of MMORPGs. On top of that, the French audience is bound to find some lovingly crafted easter eggs and pop culture references.

The game began its life as a Kickstarter project and had certain problems, as well as missing assets. Our job was to make Noob ship-shape, optimize it, and port it to Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and the PC.

But that’s not all. While porting, we also localized the game for new regions!

The biggest problem we encountered at first was optimization. The previous developer left a clumsy codebase that was less than optimized. We had to manually refactor most of the game’s code to improve performance and fix the abundance of bugs. The Unity Profiler tool was a great help in finding specific problems in the code.

We also implemented a LOD system (which was especially necessary for the Nintendo Switch port), for which we had to create object groups and prefabs. We built an Editor tool that went over all gameplay scenes and created said prefabs while neatly structuring them in a hierarchy that doesn’t break the game.

Then we reworked the particle system to use a logarithmic method to reduce the number of particle system emissions to improve performance.

Since the previous developer lost some of the assets, we also had the pleasure of recreating them.

We also worked on object pooling, memory optimization, addressable system integration, and patch size improvement.

To further improve performance, we worked with object display distance, NPC behavior, the EventSystem tool, and much more: texture, video, and audio compression, mesh combination, object draw pool improvements…

It was quite a bit of work, but luckily for us, Microids were more than accommodating during the process, communicated expectations, set deadlines, and assisted the process where they could.

Now that the bugs are squashed, localization is broadened, and performance is optimized, you can seek out adventure, face hundreds of monsters, and become part of Horizon MMORPG’s elite in Noob - The Factionless on Xbox One, Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and the PC.