UNITY FOR GAMES ⟶ CASE STUDY

T H E FA LCO N E E R
A N I N D I E ’ S U N I Q U E V I S I O N TA K E S F L I G H T
O N M U LT I P L E P L AT F O R M S .

Solo developer Tomas Sala paints strong emotions with

textureless art in The Falconeer, a masterpiece of aerial combat.
 THE CHALLENGE
Launching a multiplatform
game as a solo indie
THE FALCONEER:
A UNIT Y CASE
STUDY
P L AT F O R M S
Nintendo Switch™; PC; PlayStation 4/5;
Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S

How does a one-man studio accomplish an Xbox

P R O J E C T S TA F F Series X|S launch title, a BAFTA nomination, and
1 multiplatform versions – including a Nintendo
Switch™ port – with a single game? Tomas Sala
succeeded with The Falconeer using a textureless,
minimalist art style that proclaims, “less is more.”
L O C AT I O N
Watford U.K. and
Amsterdam, the Netherlands

© 2021 Unity Technologies —2

 GO I N G SO LO,
BUT NOT ALON E
According to Tomas Sala, creator of The Falconeer, “Solo
developer is a loaded term.” He didn’t do much music, he
outsourced Xbox certification to a friend, and his publishers
helped with QA. But he did everything else, and for a
development platform, he’s used Unity for almost his entire
career. “I’m standing on the shoulders of maybe a thousand
Unity developers,” he acknowledges. Unity is key to his
success going solo.

© 2021 Unity Technologies —3

 R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S → T H E R E S U LT S →
THE RESULTS
→ Nominated for BAFTA Debut Game
in 2021 award
→ Supported native 4K and 120 fps
in Xbox Series X|S launch title

→ Achieved a smooth 60fps on

Nintendo Switch

→ Ported to PC and six consoles

in-house
 WINNING AS AN
INDEPENDENT STUDIO
Along with a deeply personal creative vision, Sala is unusually accomplished
and driven. After art school, he worked for 17 years as a cofounder and creative
director of Little Chicken Games, and he followed this up with several gigs
consulting at design agencies.

But he came to realize that the scrummed, highly structured work environments
of most successful studios weren’t for him. “I love the people, I just don’t
like meetings and bureaucracy. I want to get to work,” he says, echoing the
sentiments of many a Unity developer. He decided to try going
it alone.

As evidenced by the runaway success of The Falconeer, it was a good decision.

He’s had complete creative control over every aspect of his game, and he could
follow whatever development path he chose. He was no longer bogged down in
project-management spreadsheets, and he could work at home with his family.

Watch the official trailer for The Falconeer.

© 2021 Unity Technologies —5

TAKING FLIGHT
WITH UNIT Y
In The Falconeer, the player is a pilot atop a warbird in a vast, stark, oceanic world.
The basic gameplay is aerial combat to destroy pirates and fend off threats, while
avoiding a tumble into the ever-present abyss below. The emotional essence of the
struggle is summed up in the opening title sequence: “Only on the wings of a falcon
are we free from the waters that bind us.”

For Sala, these waters were his previous corporate life, working in development
environments with endless rules and tedious schedules. “The Falconeer is a game
about liberating yourself, about flying off into the sunset on a giant bird,” he says.
Creating this game was his recovery.

© 2021 Unity Technologies —6

 CODING
(AND KEEPING)
CUSTOM TOOLS
Sala has been a Unity fan since the beginning. “It’s been the
default development platform in schools and studios for some
time. Unity is pervasive. Everyone knows how to use it.”

Yet for Sala, a lot of its appeal is the way it lets him create
modifications. He finds the core very accessible, and he
constantly experiments with customizations. “I love to build
my own tools on Unity. I can turn it into a Swiss army knife,” he
says. It lets him access low-level systems without having to
code custom .dlls.

Having built up his toolkit of customizations over the years,

he especially appreciates Unity’s long-term support for the
core code. “For someone like me, Unity’s LTS releases are
really important,” he explains, because this means that he can
upgrade to newly released Unity features without losing his
favorite toys.

“ I LOV E TO B U I L D M Y OW N TO O LS O N
U N I T Y. I C A N T U R N I T I N T O A S W I S S
A R M Y K N I F E .”
— Tomas Sala, Developer, The Falconeer

© 2021 Unity Technologies —7

BRINGING A UNIQUE
VISION TO LIFE WITH
TEXTURELESS ART
Sala had always wanted to create a game with just color and lines, to
design a textureless simplicity with a strong emotional impact. Unity
enables developers to apply baked and procedural textures to any mesh
while minimizing both memory overhead and development time. It’s an easy
enough task for a solo developer, but Sala was after a completely different
look for The Falconeer.

Extreme visual detail, like a lush symphony, can certainly evoke deep
feelings, but Sala played a simpler tune. “The world of The Falconeer is a
different way of looking at game art,” he says. He deliberately minimized
detail to keep the focus on what’s important rather than visual distractions.
“The key for me was to very carefully place things rather than just cover the
canvas.”

On the practical side, his minimalistic approach complemented his choice of

game genres. He says that whereas a strategy game typically needs a rich
story, extensive level design, pathfinding, and other tools to be fun, “aerial
combat is actually a primitive game type” with little collision avoidance and,
on the whole, a much shorter development cycle. Not coincidentally, he
grew up playing Microsoft Flight Simulator.

© 2021 Unity Technologies —8

 PUBLISHING
ANY WHERE WITH
UNIT Y ’S MULTIPL ATFORM
CAPABILITIES
While The Falconeer premiered as a launch title for Xbox Series X and Series S, Sala
designed it around the Switch. “It’s much easier for one developer to build for the
most constrained platform and then port to the more powerful ones rather than vice
versa,” he says. This strategy also put him under much less pressure after the initial
launch to get the performance scaling done for backporting to older consoles.

And, again proving its value to sole developers, Unity made the difference. “Unity
multiplatform capabilities are extremely robust for both controller inputs and
platform integrations,” he says.

Sala did all the Switch optimizations himself, and he credits Unity forums and
technical support for advance tips on porting to Xbox Series X before the console
was even released. “With Unity, I think the smallest studio can easily publish on any
platform they want.”

© 2021 Unity Technologies —9

KEEPING IT
SIMPLE
Sala’s imaginative approach to textureless art in The
Falconeer parallels his imaginative use of his game
platform. Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, he says “Unity lets
me think differently. I can script crazy ways of doing
things or use default features, there’s always a choice.”
For example, when he needed gradient effects, he used
UV coordinates that went from one to zero between
two colors and merged in vertex colors to get exactly
the look he wanted. “I found out later that Unity had this
function already, but I had fun figuring it out for myself.”
However, business constraints are always a factor,
and solo developers have to keep production on track.
Sala spent extra time optimizing his art pipeline so that
© 2021 Unity Technologies
content could go in rough but come out polished and
coherent. And rather than create intricately detailed
environments, he’s opted to spice up simplicity, adding
a few carefully chosen features to amplify minimalist
assets.
He feels it’s important for solo developers to avoid
rabbit holes – if an approach isn’t working and takes up
too much time, let go and try something different. And
he says that it’s easy to get lost in the incredibly rich
Unity Asset Store. “Unity has so many cool assets, but
sometimes it’s best to just keep it simple,” he advises.
His most cherished ideal, however, is that indies build
their games as personal expressions, reflecting their
inner worlds, joys, and perspectives.
— 10
 UNLOCKING AN
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
CAPABILITIES WITH UNIT Y
Admittedly, Sala is no newbie in the gaming industry, and over the years he’s collected
tremendous insight into how to do the most with limited resources. He knows that
having the right tools is a prerequisite for success and says, “Unity is an encyclopedia of
capabilities, and, for a solo indie, it’s priceless.”

“UNITY IS AN
E N C YC LO P E D I A O F
C A PA B I L I T I E S , A N D,
FOR A SOLO INDIE,
I T ’ S P R I C E L E S S .”
— Tomas Sala, Developer, The Falconeer

© 2021 Unity Technologies — 11