O3DE recently had a new video sharing lessons on publishing a mobile game using the O3DE game engine.

This video features Travis Boatman and Lloyd de Lewis from Carbonated, a mobile game studio, who share their experience and lessons learned from shipping their third-person shooter, Mad World, using the Open 3D Engine (O3DE).

Thoughts:

Never thought that O3DE (Formerly Lumberyard) would have a game shipped on Mobile (Android & iOS) I have been looking for unreal engine alternatives for a long time and have been keeping an eye back then on Lumberyard now O3DE, but it was not meant to be due to the problems back then but it looks like after going open source things might be better for O3DE as it has been getting update and easier to install and use.

O3DE previously lack examples of shippe products likes games and has added pivots to Robotics and other Real time Simulation projects, and it looked like for a while games was taking a back seat.

now we have them as a good example. I do hope this will continue as more devs look at the engine with AAA roots (Cryengine) it has been rewritten since 2023 with improvements to the renderer and other things in engine.

No royalties

One advantage this engine has is open source license so you can own your own tech. No royatly fees needed or threshold limits.

even though unreal engine has been generous with their license it’s still a licensed product and not open source.

Still not easy to use

The games list on O3DE has about 4 games published but this number is still small compared to Unity or Unreal engine.

Despite the improvements I still feel trying O3DE out it is not an easy engine to use with its roots being in cryengine.

There is also no easy path to get it on mobile. Even though there is an option as CryEngine / Lumberyard does not have hardware targets for mobile optimised yet. Its coming but I am not sure how much emphasis is placed on mobile.

https://docs.o3de.org/docs/learning-guide/made-with-o3de/

AI Summary

Engine Choice: Why O3DE?

Carbonated chose O3DE, which originated from Amazon’s Lumberyard, over competing engines like Unity and Unreal for foundational, business-driven reasons:

• Full Ownership and Licensing Control: The primary driver was the desire for full source code access and permissive licensing [12:12]. This ensures they “own their own tech” and have control over their destiny, avoiding potential issues like licensing changes seen in proprietary engines [13:34].
• Mobile Optimization: For high-end 3D mobile games, O3DE is preferred over Unreal Engine because it offers the essential high-fidelity fundamentals without the heavy, unnecessary fidelity that is often overkill for a small phone screen [14:52].
• Focus on Fun First: O3DE provides all the necessary components to ship a game and test for fun and retention. Developers can then layer in heavy graphics and polish after confirming the core game experience is successful and viable [17:18].

Shipping and Performance

The team confirmed that O3DE is a viable engine for shipping a fully featured mobile game:

• App Store Approval: The game successfully passed Apple and Google approval numerous times [09:01].
• iOS Performance: The game runs at a fast frame rate, including 60 frames per second, on all supported Apple devices (iPhone 11 and up) and fits within memory [09:33]. However, developers must manage thermal issues to prevent battery drain and overheating [09:51].
• Android Performance: O3DE is highly performant on Android devices that support the Vulkan graphics API [10:16].

Technical and Development Insights

Engineering (C++ and Modularity)

• C++ Core: The engine’s C++ core is leveraged for direct access to hardware and operating systems, allowing the team to create a very performant game [24:02].
• Lua for UI: High-level functionality, such as the UI, is built using Lua to ensure quick iteration and a clean separation of concerns [25:33].
• Data-Driven Renderer (DDR): The DDR is highly praised for its modularity. Unlike the previous fixed renderer, it allows developers to swap render components at runtime, enabling efficient platform targeting (e.g., omitting 3D rendering features for a 2D-only view) [27:01].
• Extensibility: O3DE is easily extensible (e.g., adding Game Center support) and stays future-proofed by adapting to new APIs and SDKs [20:09].
• Gems and Tooling: The Gem system allows for easy creation of custom modules and components. Furthermore, the Python editor bindings are a valuable feature for writing specialized editor tooling [31:06].

Art and Animation

• Artist-Friendly Shaders: The Material Canvas editor is intuitive and allows artists to easily create and modify PBR materials and shaders (like the custom water shader they developed), which can be built for both PC and mobile [30:15].
• Powerful Animation: The Animation Editor is flexible, supporting complex blending (e.g., between walk and run states) and the layering of animations onto specific body parts (e.g., upper body firing while lower body is walking) [41:55].
• Advanced Lighting: The main render pipeline (used for high-fidelity marketing assets or loading screens) features a real-time Diffuse Probe Grid (for global illumination) and other screen-space effects, making scenes look “almost photographic” without the need for pre-baked lighting [51:18].

Community

The team notes that O3DE is like the “Blender of game engines” and encourages growth, as it currently lacks the massive community and extensive feature set of rival commercial engines [18:13]. The team is committed to contributing their improvements (such as weather effects and the mobile render pipeline) back to the open-source community [17:56].