Behind the Scenes: Devoted’s Art Director Igor Doroshchuk on the Open Roads Project

Porting a game to the Nintendo Switch is a bit like trying to fit a big, fancy sofa through a narrow doorway — tricky but rewarding once it’s in place! 

For Devoted Studios, bringing the Open Roads Project to the Switch meant getting creative to make sure everything ran smoothly on the platform’s compact hardware. The Switch doesn’t have the power of bigger consoles, so the team, led by Art Director Igor Doroshchuk, along with Michael Bistakis, came up with some clever ideas to keep the game looking great without slowing down.

The team found that with the right tweaks and a bit of out-of-the-box thinking, even a project with a lot of moving parts could feel right at home on Nintendo’s portable console. So read along!

About Igor

Igor Doroshchuk is the 3D Art Director at Devoted Studios, where he also takes on a Technical Support role. With over 11 years of experience in the game development industry, he specializes in creating 3D props, environments, textures, and materials across various pipelines. 

In addition to his creative work, Igor leads a team of artists, develops tailored pipelines for them, and ensures the delivery of high-quality assets for each project. He also provides technical support, including shader creation, asset integration, scene lighting, and prefab assembly for projects on both Unreal and Unity platforms.

We caught up with Igor Doroshchuk to talk about his work on the Open Roads Project, here’s the inside scoop on how he and his team tackled the obstacles to make this ambitious project come to life.

The Biggest Challenge During the Open Road Project

One of the biggest challenges for Igor’s team was designing scenes with an endless road surrounded by trees on both sides. 

“The biggest challenge was to properly implement a big amount of the trees… where you are just driving the car, and you can have an endless road,” Igor explained. The goal was to create a lively and immersive environment that didn’t slow down gameplay.

However, the Nintendo Switch added extra limitations, as it has much lower technical capabilities compared to other platforms. “Nintendo has low parameters, low technical specifications, and we need to be wise in the ways we implement any system for the trees,” Igor shared. 

The team had to get creative, eventually turning to a particle system to handle the trees, which saved memory and processing power. “We decided to convert all the trees to a simple particle system and spawn them. And that could help us to save a lot of polygons, a lot of budget to run this amount of the trees for these scenes,” he explained.

Solving Unexpected Issues

Like any project, the Open Roads Project was no stranger to unexpected issues. Igor shared his approach for dealing with these surprises, “For these types of issues, I’m personally using the approach that helps me a lot through my entire career in game development.” 

His technique involves:

Isolating the problem

Pinpointing possible causes

Testing each solution until the issue is resolved

You start by isolating the problem. For instance, sometimes when you run the scene and some scripts start causing the problem, you just start deleting the game object in the scene one by one in runtime and see what happens.

This hands-on approach is straightforward but highly effective in narrowing down the source of the problem.

Iterations and Finding New Solutions

Before deciding on the particle system for the trees, the team spent months testing other solutions. “Of course, this is the tree system,” Igor said when asked about parts of the project that took longer than expected. “Before we came out with the particle system solution for the trees, we ran a couple of iterations.”

They tried different approaches, including optimizing shaders, adjusting the draw distance, and experimenting with an occlusion culling system. “We tried a lot of the stuff, and this helped us understand that probably we need to think out of the box,” he said. 

After three months of testing, they landed on the particle system, a solution that eventually worked well for their needs.

We were at the point where we literally tried everything… and this is the only solution that came up in our heads, and we tried to use it, and it seems like it worked pretty well.

Making the Game Work for the Nintendo Switch

Since the game was focused on the Nintendo Switch, the team had to make sure it ran as smoothly as possible on this platform. “Since we were oriented for the Nintendo platform, we tried to optimize the scenes, the game itself as hard as we can,” Igor explained.

The team collaborated with partners who had access to a Nintendo Switch development kit. “We asked our partners to run it on the Nintendo Switch DEV kit and give us some metrics so that we could understand how it works, what we need to do,” he said. This testing process led them to simplify the trees further by turning all 3D trees into 2D planes that always face the camera.

“We kind of turned all 3D trees to 2D planes and spawned them like, you know, like cards, like billboards that always face the camera,” Igor explained. 

Important Lessons Learned

Reflecting on his work on the Open Roads Project, Igor shared some valuable lessons he learned along the way. “This is thinking out of the box,” he said.

You don’t need to be focused on the solution you already have. Of course, for that, you need experience and creativity, and only those two could help you find really creative and really good and workable solutions.

Igor emphasized that even failures can be useful learning experiences. “Even if you fail with something and your approach will not work… that experience could help you in the future,” he shared. This mindset is what helped the team keep going, even when they faced challenges that seemed nearly impossible.

Advice for Future Projects

Igor had advice for other game developers facing similar challenges. He encouraged an open-minded approach to problem-solving. “You should always try to do some crazy stuff, and sometimes that could be quite helpful for you,” he said.

“And of course, you need to remember about the estimation of the project deadlines,” he added.

The Open Roads shows that even the toughest challenges can be handled with creativity, teamwork, and a willingness to think outside the box.

A big Thanks to Michael Bistakis who was a huge part of the Open Roads Project for the team. He has successfully brought fresh ideas and solutions to make the game work so well on the Nintendo Switch!