Brace Yourself Games - Phantom Brigade

Brace Yourself Games is creating Phantom Brigade with the help of Odin!

We recently had the opportunity to meet with Artyom Zuev (Technical artist) and Adelaide Jenkins (Creative Lead) of Brace Yourself Games to discuss how they are using Odin Inspector to help build their awesome new game, Phantom Brigade.

Phantom Brigade is a hybrid turn-based & real-time tactical RPG, focusing on in-depth customization and player driven stories. As the last surviving squad of mech pilots, you must capture enemy equipment and facilities to level the playing field. Outnumbered and out-gunned, you have to lead the Brigade through a desperate campaign to retake their war-torn homeland.

But words don't really do the game justice, so check out this awesome trailer.

Productivity

In Artyom and Adelaide's own words:

"Using Odin is like having our own tool developer. It removes friction and allows us to prototype faster."

Phantom Brigade includes some complicated UI elements and custom behaviors. The game is also loaded with complex data, and Odin gives the ability to access it in ways that would otherwise require a lot of coding. We can iterate faster, try a lot more things that we would not normally have time for."

Using the child property resolvers, a powerful feature provided by Odin, enabled our developers to build an inspector controlling dozens of atomic UI elements in a single condensed view, supercharging iteration times on elements like complex animated buttons. Conditional attributes further optimize the workflow, allowing us to hide any data irrelevant to current configuration from view - in contrast with standard inspector, which overwhelms you with unnecessary information.

Automation

"There is a lot of busy work that goes into making a game. Odin eliminates a significant amount of that work."

By building useful and powerful tools with Odin, the development process naturally becomes more automated. Using Odin, a smaller development team can produce work that looks like it was built by a much larger team.

"There is not one attribute that I can see that is not useful."

(For a really great list of Odin attributes check out the attributes page on the Odin website.) 

Here you can see some examples being put to use in elements of the Phantom Brigade in-game UI. "Using the constraining attributes and conditional warnings, we take a lot of guesswork out of data entry and prevent errors. Overall, the whole workflow of dotting your code with a few attributes and instantly getting a custom inspector is akin to fully automating custom inspector programming. Before, we had to dedicate days at a time creating and maintaining custom inspectors to serve our needs. Now, just a few lines of code atop our fields produce equally useful results that gracefully handle every bit of functionality you expect from bespoke Unity tools - prefab overriding, undoing, copying, dragging etc."

Support

We also wanted to ask what the team thought about the service and support of Odin by Sirenix.

"The level of support is unheard of, we usually get a response within minutes".

Support for Odin has always been a top priority for the team at Sirenix. The game developer community is the best and they deserve the best. Jump on the Odin Discord channel or check out the many reviews at the Unity Asset Store and you will quickly get an idea of the level of support on offer.

To wrap up, Phantom Brigade looks like it is going to be a great game, and we're very much looking forward to playing it!  I personally like the fact that it includes destructible environments (the game allows every square meter of every scene to be destroyed). Should be awesome! To learn more about the game, check out the Phantom Brigade webpage

Best of luck to the team at Brace Yourself Games, and thanks for being power-users of Odin Inspector!

Making a game with Odin?

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Reach out via email or Discord and let us know if you would like to be included in a future blog post. Be sure to also check out the Odin website We would love to get your feedback about the site and it's a great place to stay updated on all things Odin.