Chinese developer Hypergryph held a media conference to share technical details about their upcoming free-to-play action RPG Arknights: Endfield, with the team revealing that creating the game’s detailed graphics required major changes to the Unity engine.

Arknights: Endfield is a spin-off of Hypergryph’s 2019 mobile game Arknights. The new game represents a significant shift from the original’s 2D tower defense gameplay to a 3D real-time strategic action format. While Hypergryph has used 3D graphics for Arknights cinematics before, Endfield marks the first fully 3D title in the series.

The development team made several technical decisions that pushed the limits of standard game development. Character models in Endfield use approximately 80,000 to 100,000 polygons each on PC and console versions, with the mobile version using 40,000 to 50,000 polygons. According to Hypergryph, this is about 1.5 times the average polygon count found in other 3D games. The game displays up to four playable characters on screen at once, which increases the rendering workload.

Beyond character models, Endfield includes factory management and automation gameplay similar to Coffee Stain’s Satisfactory. This means the factory structures and movable objects are constantly rendered alongside the characters, further adding to the performance demands.

To handle these requirements, Hypergryph made extensive modifications to Unity’s rendering pipeline. In an earlier interview with AUTOMATON this year, the team explained that while Unity’s base structure, editor, and tools remained unchanged, nearly everything else was rebuilt. The graphics rendering system received a complete overhaul.

The team implemented a data-oriented Entity Component System (ECS) approach for the engine’s core architecture, allowing game components to be processed more efficiently. They also completely revised the graphics API to meet the game’s performance needs.

Hypergryph developed custom shading technology that works across multiple platforms. The team noted that rendering dynamic shadows for distant objects is typically challenging, but Endfield renders dynamic shadows across the entire field, including objects in the near, mid, and far background. For the factory building system, the developers used custom ECS-based data processing and rendering techniques to achieve dynamic lighting and shading.