Capcom: Tell us about RE ENGINE.
Capcom: RE ENGINE is our proprietary engine and utilizes an asset-based development approach that has been predominant for several years in North America. Under a conventional game development approach, programs used to manage all of the information in a game; however, since information is packed into things such as backgrounds and characters, asset-based development is more effective because it lets you manage or make detailed modifications at the asset level. Our RE ENGINE includes everything that we need to develop games for next-generation consoles and is also optimized for VR game development.
Capcom: So, as you say, it's efficient. Can you give us a specific example of what the engine is useful for?
Capcom: For one thing, it is useful for enabling VR. In a VR game, the screen must be refreshed at a speed of at least 60 frames per second to prevent the player from getting motion sickness. And maintaining the processing necessary for 60 frames per second requires sophisticated control over the level of quality in the game. With a conventional engine, programmers identify and modify each problem while considering the effect overall. This is quite a burdensome task. Asset-based control, on the other hand, enables us to control the quality by substituting objects that impose high loads with objects that impose lighter loads. The ability exert control on an individual object-basis is a great advantage.
Capcom: How did you structure development or organize the team?
Capcom: The development structure of RESIDENT EVIL 7 depended deeply on RE ENGINE. Although we call it an engine, in reality it's more than a tool; it's something that supports our entire development environment. It's a big system that dictates how we make and think about each part of development. So when dividing the development team into groups, we didn't use traditional groupings based on roles such as design, sound and programming; rather, we divided the team according to the scenes in the game, and these groups swiftly adapted in accordance to how development progressed.
