UNITY FOR GAMES ⟶ CASE STUDY

ZO I N K RO L LS A A A A H I T W I T H
“ D I C E O P E R A” F A N T A S Y

LO ST I N
RANDOM
The indie’s success builds on long partnerships with
Unity and EA Originals.
 THE CHALLENGE
Maintaining multiplatform
performance without
ZOINK STUDIOS:
compromising a unique art style
A UNIT Y CASE
P L AT F O R M S STUDY
Nintendo Switch™, PC, PlayStation® 4/5,
Xbox One, Xbox X|S
Game designers and artists can sometimes get
carried away brainstorming spectacular features
and dazzling settings, and it’s usually the developers
P R O J E C T S TA F F
who bring them back to earth by reminding them of
50+
performance challenges and other constraints. But
when Zoink started creating the magical world of
Lost in Random, with its detailed and extraordinarily
L O C AT I O N imaginative fairytale levels, the engineers got as
Gothenburg, Sweden excited as anyone and promised to deliver on the
unique vision without compromise.

© 2022 Unity Technologies —2

 CO M M I T T E D TO
A VISION
After launching a series of increasingly complex games, Lost in Random would
be, by far, Zoink’s most sophisticated project to date. Though a small studio,
they resolved to release a AAA-level hit, with support from EA Originals.
Zoink had a long history of success with Unity and they fully understood its
capabilities, so they set out to realize an ambitious artistic vision and create
what Kotaku called “the most innovative game of 2021.”

© 2022 Unity Technologies —3

 R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S →
THE RESULTS
→ Deployed in-house to Switch, PC,
PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One, and
Xbox X|S simultaneously

→ Created AAA-quality visuals

across all platforms using the
Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
and Unity lighting tools

→ URP’s shader authoring with

ShaderGraph made possible
to customize URP’s default Lit
shader and build new ones used
extensively in the game

→ Leveraged Aura2 from Unity’s

Asset Store to create state-of-
the-art volumetric fog and lighting
effects on multiple platforms as
part of a modular approach to
creation with a lean team

→ Game received Best Indie Award

at Gamescom and an Official
Selection at the 2021 Tribeca
Festival
 EXPLORING GORGEOUS,
DANGEROUS WORLDS
Zoink founder Klaus Lyngeled created his first commercial game for the
Commodore platform. He went on to work on Shiny Entertainment’s Messiah,
known for its breakthrough tessellation techniques. After founding Zoink in 2001,
he expanded his expertise by producing Wii, mobile, Facebook, and browser
titles. In 2013, the studio launched Stick it to the Man!, its first multiplatform
console game, which is still a popular download. In it, Ray, the hero, sports a
giant pink spaghetti arm sticking out of his brain – clearly the product of a highly
creative art- and innovation-driven studio.

Zoink followed up with a sequel and, in their first EA Originals project, crafted
Fe, a 2D Metroidvania-style action-adventure game of fairies in a Nordic forest.
They continued with Ghost Giants for PlayStation VR and the Oculus Quest,
again building a gorgeous, handcrafted world with emotional depth and a clever
storyline. According to Zoink’s creative director Olov Redmalm, “Our games
feature completely different styles, atmospheres, and tones, but share a longing
for exploration in game design and strange, handcrafted worlds.”

© 2022 Unity Technologies —5

GET TING
LOST IN R ANDOM
The Zoink team had several goals when they started brainstorming their
next game. After the cute and colorful Ghost Giant, they wanted to build
something darker with a grander narrative vision. They planned to combine
the mystery of Fe and deep emotion of Ghost Giant with sharp, funny
dialog written by award-winning comic book writer Ryan North. And they
wanted a stunning art style that would delight players and run smoothly on
everything from a handheld Switch to an Xbox Series X.

After one of the artists found a painting of a girl carrying a big die,
a macabre yet beautiful world, one ruled by randomness, began
to take shape. This inspired gameplay similar to that of a giant
tabletop with dice, cards, and playing pieces.

CEO Lyngeled had long promoted using handcrafted media

for stylistic inspiration, and this was a good opportunity to try
realistic, claymation-like characters. The ultimate vision added up to a
potential epic, with Redmalm adding, “I’ve always loved Star Wars as a space
opera, and with Ryan’s scripting, I knew we could make Lost in Random an
amazing dice opera.”

© 2022 Unity Technologies —6

TURNING
HANDCR AFTED
CL AY MODELS
INTO 3D
GAME ART
The artists started modeling assets for this dark and
strange world out of tangible materials like clay, metal, and
wood. The main characters’ faces were all first sculpted
in clay to hone their style and feel, while different level
components such as houses and kitchens were sculpted
in Zbrush.

After rendering in 3D, environment artists could layer on

customizations as needed. This enabled Zoink to take
a modular approach to environment art while keeping
it performant and cost effective. For example, many
elements, such as planks, iron plates, pots, and more,
could be combined into different sorts of constructions and
environments. Not only was this cost- and performance-
effective, but it also added to the handcrafted feel of the
world, since it looked like everything was assembled by
someone giant compared to the protagonist.

Despite Zoink’s rapid headcount increase after Ghost

Giant, Lyngeled, himself a clay sculptor, organized
small workshops to encourage creativity. This spurred
detailed clay and other handcrafted models and,
as they proliferated, so did the detail of the levels.
The team ended up quite large, with a considerable
number of assets. This pushed rendering times, but it
also fostered developer creativity.

Working on Ghost Giant, they had devised a number

of techniques to deal with the performance challenges
of VR. The techniques weren’t all applicable for Lost in
Random, but Redmalm says, “We had confidence we
could solve it in Unity without compromising on the
art style.” They ended up unnoticeably parsing
scenes into smaller sections while maintaining full
graphic complexity.

© 2022 Unity Technologies —7

 CONJURING TOP
GR APHICS AND
DYNAMIC LIGHTING
Zoink started off using the High Definition Render Pipeline
(HDRP), assuming they’d need it to get the level of detailed
realism they wanted. However, with the goal of launching on
next-gen, Switch, and older consoles simultaneously, they took
a closer look at the results they could get from the URP with its
much-lower overhead. Between tweaking and experimenting
throughout the process, environmental artist Leo Brynielsson
would test screenshots on colleagues until they couldn’t tell the
difference between URP and HDRP.

Zoink continued the work using the URP with tools from the
Unity Asset Store to selectively optimize ambient occlusion and
enable decals. Brynielsson says, “Unity is very extendable and
adjustable, so it was fairly easy for us to quickly adapt some of
our original HDRP work for the URP.”

Another important change was moving to dynamic lighting.

They began the project with baked lighting, but many of the
darker scenes with crucial highlights required much larger
files and, again, too much overhead. To make dynamic lighting
work, they devised a way to use invisible meshes to selectively
block light instead of creating shadows. Again, the results were
nearly indistinguishable from baking, and the performance
gains were considerable.

“ U N I T Y I S V E RY E X T E N DA B L E A N D
A D J U S TA B L E , S O I T WA S F A I R LY E A S Y
F O R U S T O Q U I C K LY A D A P T S O M E O F
OUR ORIGINAL HDRP WORK FOR THE
U R P.”
— Leo Brynielsson, Environment Artist, Zoink Studios

© 2022 Unity Technologies —8

CREATING CUTSCENES
AND SEQUENCING
FLYING SPIDERS
“Unity Timeline and Cinemachine were the backbone of all our cutscenes,”
says technical artist Mathias Lorensson. “Setting up the virtual cameras and
scrolling through the results in real-time instead of having to play the game
made it so easy.”

This ease extended to collaboration. After setting up virtual cameras and

placing temporary characters in the environment, they’d animate a rough
blockout based on the storyboard and export it. After that, the team would add
in the real character rigs and send them to the animators to work their magic.
Once the work was animated, it could simply be dropped back into
the Timeline.

Timeline also let them mix and match clips to create ambient scenes. For
example, they often dropped in “jump scares,” where a huge mechanical spider
suddenly popped up out of nowhere. Cinemachine also let them fine-tune
post-processing options with the various virtual cameras, instead of using just
the main camera.

© 2022 Unity Technologies —9

PL ANNING FOR
MULTIPL ATFORM FROM
DAY ONE
Lost in Random versions for all platforms (Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5,
Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S) launched simultaneously, and, thanks to Unity, all of the
porting was accomplished in-house.

“Unity does so much of the heavy lifting when

you’re porting to different platforms. It gave us
much more time to concentrate on the game
itself,” says Redmalm. Although Zoink originally
wasn’t sure a Switch version would be worth the
effort, Unity let them quickly organize assets and test
quality settings in real-time. “I remember running the
first tests on Switch,” he continues. “Having such a big
fairytale on a handheld device felt amazing! It was just
like holding a living storybook, making it a perfect fit
for the game.”

Brynielsson added that regardless of how convenient Unity

made it to manage a multiplatform launch, it’s still vitally
important to decide on platforms early in a project and to test
iterations early and often. “It’s hard to keep within strict performance
guidelines, but you can’t skip them. They have to be a top priority,” he says.

“ U N I T Y D O E S S O M U C H O F T H E H E AV Y
L I F T I N G W H E N YO U ’ R E P O RT I N G TO
D I F F E R E N T P L AT F O R M S . I T G AV E U S
M U C H M O R E T I M E TO CO N C E N T R AT E O N
THE GAME ITSELF”
— Olov Redmalm, Creative Director, Zoink Studios

© 2022 Unity Technologies — 10

 EMPOWERING INDIES
For years, Lyngeled has worked to empower indie developers in southwestern
Sweden, and Zoink recently joined Thunderful Development, a conglomerate
of studios and investment, distribution, and publishing groups. This models
Lyngeled’s belief in supporting small, highly creative teams within a much
larger organization. It also mirrors the core philosophy of EA Originals, which
aims to work “with the best and boldest independent studios across the world
to make sure these games get the scale of audience they deserve, with zero
compromise on vision.”

With Lost in Random, everyone rolled a winner.

© 2022 Unity Technologies — 11