Housemarque Competence

Technology on the Edge

We at Housemarque have a mature and versatile base technology that has been used in several published titles on many different platforms and continue to push the boundaries of what can be achieved in games. Our suite of technologies is developed by our dedicated tools and technology team of skilled people with years of industry experience. Our game creation tools are supporting the development of games in many different categories. This has proven invaluable for our games which have been remarkably diverse for a small developer in the recent years: the hectic Super Stardust HD™, relaxed Golf: Tee It Up™, terrifying Dead Nation™, and fluid Outland™.

Our proprietary technology consists of several different parts, which includes engines, libraries, production pipeline and game editor component. Over the years, we probably have done technology development on more platforms than most of other developers in the world. In the past, we’ve developed for Xbox, Playstation 2, Sega Dreamcast and for early handheld platforms (Palm, Zodiac, N-gage, Gizmondo, Symbian, J2ME/Brew). Currently our technology supports PSP, NGP, PC, iOS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and adding new platforms have proven to be straightforward due our platform agnostic approach to our tools and technologies.

In a nutshell, here’s the overview of our proprietary technology infrastructure.

  • Edge – development libraries. These libraries include base system functionality such as data containers, resource management and linear algebra. Second tier libraries provide access to system services, such as game controllers, file system and multithreading. They also include our in-game debugging and statistics services, memory management system and more.
  • Sasquatch – game and graphics engine. The engine is designed for modularity, portability and power. Most of it is drop-in portable. It is easy to add a new platform and even easier to add features as required by new game projects. High degree of modularity and well-defined roles allow components to be added or replaced with customized drop-in versions.
  • The North Star System – The North Star system consists of two distinct modules; Twister and Rock. Together the modules combined with Autodesk Maya form a highly integrated yet customizable /editor/pipeline/game engine/ system.
    • Twister is powerful, flexible, robust and easy-to-use content creation pipeline. The concept behind of Twister is designer oriented instead of technology oriented. Twister allows the designers and artists to work independently of programmers with the tools that they are already familiar with.
    • Rock is a set of industry-strength libraries specifically designed to speed-up and simplify creation of games. The set has been under consistent development for over nine years.

Third party components integrated into our framework

  • Havok physics engine
  • Box2D, 2d physics system
  • Lua scripting language
  • Wwise sound engine
  • Fmod Ex sound engine

Major third Party tools used in the development

  • MS VisualStudio .net
  • Autodesk Maya
  • Various Maya plug-ins
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Subversion
  • SN systems ProDG development suite
  • Hansoft – project management software