NITRO GEN OMEGA: Bringing the art style of “spaghetti anime” to life with UE5
DESTINYbit is a game development studio based in Ravenna, Italy, that strives to make
uncomparable games. They are the creators of Empires Apart and the award-winning Dice Legacy. Founded in 2016 and acquired by Amplifier Game Invest in 2020, DESTINYbit is part of the Embracer Group.
DESTINYbit, the award-winning developer from Ravenna, Italy is no stranger to Unreal Engine. In fact, they have been choosing Unreal Engine since UE3 with projects like Empire Apart and Dice Legacy. With all that experience under their belt, the small indie team stuck with UE to help them deliver their latest game on PC.
NITRO GEN OMEGA brings a unique flavor to the tactical RPG genre with an innovative “spaghetti anime” art style that blends high-octane cinematic mech battles with visuals that put players in the director seat of their own anime episode.
Developed with Unreal Engine 5, the team at DESTINYbit leveraged features like Sequencer, Animation Blueprints, Niagara, MetaSounds, and the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework to bring the unique art style and open world to life.
To learn more, we spoke to DESTINYbit’s CEO and Creative Director Gian Paolo Vernocchi.
NITRO GEN OMEGA brings a unique flavor to the tactical RPG genre with an innovative “spaghetti anime” art style that blends high-octane cinematic mech battles with visuals that put players in the director seat of their own anime episode.
Developed with Unreal Engine 5, the team at DESTINYbit leveraged features like Sequencer, Animation Blueprints, Niagara, MetaSounds, and the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) framework to bring the unique art style and open world to life.
To learn more, we spoke to DESTINYbit’s CEO and Creative Director Gian Paolo Vernocchi.
Thanks for taking the time to join us! Can you start by telling us what NITRO GEN OMEGA is all about?
Gian Paolo Vernocchi, CEO & Creative Director: On paper, NITRO GEN OMEGA is a sandbox tactical RPG where you lead a crew of mercenaries and their mech through a post-apocalyptic world overrun by ruthless machines. But beneath the genre keywords and marketing copy, there’s a love letter to anime—a game that aspires to resemble a Japanese production but beats an Italian heart. Something we like to call “spaghetti anime”. It features an innovative timeline-based fighting system that puts you in the director’s seat of your own anime, allowing you to plan out all of your actions in advance and watch them as if you were watching an episode of a hand-drawn Japanese TV show. The game has been made with love by a small team of just 14 people.
What is the game development scene like in Ravenna, Italy where you are based?
Vernocchi: I might be mistaken but I believe we’re the only studio in Ravenna! Italy has grown a lot in the past decade, and we now have some bigger and more mature studios in our country, but we remain a relatively tiny industry and I’d really have to travel to Bologna to connect with more development studios.
What were your core development goals and why was Unreal Engine 5 selected for NITRO GEN OMEGA?
Vernocchi: NITRO GEN OMEGA is our third game as a studio using Unreal Engine and we’ve been using Unreal since UE3. From an art style point of view, we wanted to imitate the look of an anime as much as possible. Our first goal was to give as much freedom as possible to our animators, while accounting for the fact that we would need to support procedural characters and modular mechs. We knew that having access to the source code meant that we could always find a solution wherever a solution wasn’t already present. For instance, we have a very complex character rig in Maya with tons of controls and tweaks to retain as much of the 2D look as possible, and we wrote several custom nodes for our Animation Blueprints to match what we built there.
From a design standpoint, we wanted to allow as much freedom to the designers as possible
while minimizing the use of Blueprints, since initially we had a complex server-side element
planned. We employed a data-driven pipeline where complex configs could be edited using custom-built Editor Utility Widgets.
Which Unreal Engine features stood out to you most during development?
Vernocchi: The answer here might be counterintuitive. The feature we used the most was probably Sequencer, which we worked a lot on to expand to support “proxy actors” that could be replaced dynamically at runtime with customized characters and mechs—not to mention the support we added for 2D-style camera movements (i.e. pan-zoom).
But the feature that ended up standing out the most was probably PCG, which we used to build our open world continent. Within days, we had a populated island which we could easily modify and tweak via scripts while retaining a lot of artist control. It’s definitely something we want to explore more in future productions.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
NITRO GEN OMEGA feels like watching an episode of anime. Can you tell us about “spaghetti anime” and your biggest influences when crafting the game’s unique art style?
Vernocchi: Spaghetti anime means a game that looks like it comes out of Japan but beats an Italian heart. But I really couldn’t tell you more than that. It’s not really something conscious—it’s more about a group of Italian creatives working on an anime game, with a profound love for the media. Our “Italianness” is bound to eventually slip through in unconscious ways.
Visually, the game is mostly inspired by the works of Studio Trigger, Gainax, and Studio Bones. We saw many comments say that it reminded them of a Trigger anime and that’s just a huge compliment for us.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
Can you tell us about how you used Unreal Engine to achieve this art style? Did you build any custom tools or shaders to bring the visuals to life?
Vernocchi: Toon-style or anime-style shading is pretty much a solved problem at this point from a material point of view. Sure, we built a custom master material with a lot of parameters and support for things like per-character lighting and so on and so forth, but a lot of our efforts went into all the “little big things” that really give the game an anime look.
It all starts with colors. We wanted to give our artists freedom to pick colors like they do in Photoshop and to have these colors stay consistent regardless of lighting or post-process. So what we did was to replace the tonemapper entirely and allowed artists to pick not only every color individually but also its shadow and specular. We call these “color sets”. Characters and mechs rarely have explicit textures but rather have sections defined by masks that are then filled using color sets.
Then, we also needed to have super-clean outlines that matched exactly what our animators were seeing in Maya. A lot of the character expressions come from stretching and twisting the meshes to somewhat “draw” a pleasing outline, especially for the mouth, cheeks, and eyebrows.
This, combined with the fact that all of our meshes have custom-sculpted vertex normals that drive where the shadows fell, meant it was challenging to achieve the outlines we wanted. We ended up using the Deformer Graph to recalculate the normals of the characters on the fly and achieve the smooth outlines we had in Maya. These are only two of all “small things” that add up in creating the immersion of “I’m watching an anime” rather than “I’m playing a video game”.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
NITRO GEN OMEGA is quite the departure from the visual style and tone of your two previous projects, Empires Apart and Dice Legacy. Was this shift intentional from the onset and what did you learn from working on those projects that you might have applied to NITRO GEN OMEGA?
Vernocchi: The shift from our previous projects was both intentional and not, in a way. At DESTINYbit, we aspire to make what we call “Uncomparable games”—stuff you haven’t seen before. That also applies to art style. For Dice Legacy, while we adopted a miniature-style semi-realistic approach to rendering, we did it on a ringworld.
For NITRO GEN OMEGA, when we understood we wanted to make an anime game, we decided we wanted to be 100% anime: 3D but 2D-looking. This meant that we had to use a lot of the tools we learned throughout the previous two projects in completely different ways. In a way, it was like starting from scratch.
But we definitely took a lot of the learnings from Dice Legacy, especially in relation to developing for consoles, minimizing load times, and employing a data-driven approach to things.
So far we haven’t revisited the same style of rendering or gameplay twice, so in a lot of ways, we’re making things harder for ourselves. But that’s also the beauty of Unreal—no matter the style or genre we want to chase, we know we have a robust toolset to support us.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
NITRO GEN OMEGA features a unique timeline-based fighting system with dynamic camera angles, sound effects, and dynamic anime impact frames. How did Unreal Engine 5 help you achieve this?
Vernocchi: The combat animations are all powered by Sequencer. First, we would create all the character and camera animations in Maya, then import them and automatically create the Sequences using custom Python scripts. Then, the VFX artist would go in and manually add all the VFX made in Niagara and align them with the sequence and the actors appropriately. We built a library of VFX that we could more or less drag and drop into sequences and hook them up to the actors and connect them to the bones to drive all the 2D-looking effects.
Finally, we have a number of post-process effects such as impact frames that are once again
hand-animated inside Sequencer by animating parameters inside a Material Parameter Collection.
There are also small things here and there that we did that contribute to the anime look. For instance, we expanded the CineCameraComponent to support “frame panning” or in other words, the possibility of moving the frame while keeping the camera fixed in place. Much of the “camera animation” that happens in anime is really 2D pans done in compositing, and we needed to have it in order to achieve our anime look. Anything that looked “too 3D” had to go.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
Tell us about the significance of the mech and the design philosophy behind how mech customization and play styles impact the gameplay.
Vernocchi: It’s interesting, because we always approached the mech from the point of view of “it’s just a tool to tell character stories”, much like mecha is in anime. This meant that while incredibly important, it wasn’t the main focus.
Still, we wanted it to be a vehicle for player expression, and we often compared it to a rally car the characters would build and tune from battle to battle, with the Airship just acting as a giant garage.
Visually, our mechs are inspired by Italian cars and motorcycles from the 60s and 70s. Stuff like Lancia, Alfa Romeo, Fiat, Lamborghini. From a gameplay point of view, our main source of inspiration are fighting games. We wanted each mech to feel different in its play style and for each mech to also have different potential builds that took advantage of the versatility of the combat system.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
How did Unreal Engine 5 help the team develop the living, reactive open world of the Wasteland that players explore aboard the Airship?
Vernocchi: Our goal was to look hand-drawn at all times. This was very hard to achieve in the open world map, since it’s the only true “real time” section of the game, where player inputs directly and immediately translate to actions on screen.
We knew we wanted our open world to be hand-crafted as much as possible, to create a believable continent and ground the game into a common world players would be able to navigate and recognize. Being a tiny team, we needed to minimize the amount of time spent actually crafting the world, as it is pretty extensive.
That’s where PCG came into play. We initially drew the map in 2D and brought it into some world generation software to give a believable geography to the terrain. Then, we built a library of assets for each biome based on internal concept art and we assembled them using PCG.
PCG allowed our artists to quickly populate the map with forests, cities, mountains, and other props while retaining a high degree of control in how and where they were placed. We combined PCG with the Landscape tools, plus a number of hand-placed props to achieve the look we have now.
Lastly, we used MetaSounds to drive the dynamic soundtrack of the game which changes based on the Biome and whether the player is inside the Airship or navigating the world.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
In the game, players can hire procedurally generated pilots to expand their crew. Were there any specific features of UE5 that helped you bring this aspect of NITRO GEN OMEGA to life?
Vernocchi: Characters are by far the most technically challenging aspect of our entire art pipeline. Since we wanted to give our animators as much freedom as possible, we built our pipeline in Maya and then we worked to translate that into Unreal.
Thankfully, this was pretty easy, especially with how many of our effects are driven by animated material parameters and blend shapes and those worked with very minimal set up.
We then wrote a set of custom nodes for the Animation Blueprints to drive various sliders and constraints that we used to introduce even more variety into our characters.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
Did working with Unreal Engine elicit any benefits from a development time or budget perspective? If possible, please quantify this benefit in time or savings.
Vernocchi: While working with Unreal Engine brought its benefits, it’s really hard to quantify them, especially for a studio of our size and especially considering we’re on our third game using Unreal. What I would say is, the fact that with every iteration Unreal gets a significant amount of not only improvements but also new features is huge and unlocks new workflows and opportunities throughout the life of the project.
Did the Epic Development Community, Unreal Engine documentation, Fab marketplace, or other components of the Epic ecosystem assist you during development?
Vernocchi: We’re on our third game with Unreal so we’re pretty familiar with the ecosystem at this point. Epic always does a good job of providing a lot of learning materials, especially on YouTube. We know that if we run into a particularly tricky issue we can rely on Pro Support and we have occasionally integrated plugins available on the Fab marketplace.
Pro Support especially was crucial in the past to either resolve obscure engine bugs or to get access to an engineer from Epic that is an expert in the systems we're using. In the case of NITRO GEN OMEGA for instance we needed to automatically generate Sequencer sequences using Python while also managing tags. Knowing we can get access to people on the other side that have directly worked on the features we're tweaking means that we can get a detailed, well informed and reliable answer.
Image courtesy of DESTINYbit
As an Indie, how does the fact that UE comes with everything right out of the box, even source code, help you play in the same space as larger studios?
Vernocchi: Unreal Engine definitely gives us the opportunity to just make the game without thinking of the tools too much. Access to the source code makes us reasonably sure we can always find a solution even when one isn’t provided out of the box, and we have a history of doing that with all of our previous games. But on top of everything, I think we’ve always been capable of making games that look larger than their budget through a combination of clever art style, procedural generation, and leveraging the tools that the engine provides.
What sort of advice would you give indie developers considering Unreal Engine 5 for their project?
Vernocchi: I would urge them to resist the temptation to dive into realistic graphics and an open world. A lot of what’s out there right now, including tutorials and tech demos, goes in that direction and Unreal definitely makes a lot of things much more achievable and attainable (see MetaHuman) but it’s possible that many studios will also go in that direction, leading to many games looking very similar or struggling to stand out.
Unreal gets attention from the breathtaking tech demos, Lumen, and all of that, but the real power of Unreal is the sheer amount of tools it has right out of the box. From the Material Editor to Unreal Motion Graphics (UMG) to Blueprints and now PCG and beyond. It’s really full of tools that can speed up the production of titles of any genre and size and I’d urge developers to look at it more as a toolbox to create anything you can imagine, rather than as a platform to make realistic looking games faster.
Thank you for joining us! Can you tell us what’s next for NITRO GEN OMEGA and where should people go to learn more?
Vernocchi: We are continuing to improve the game based on player feedback and we recently introduced a much requested Character Creator into the game. We have more major updates planned, including new enemies and a new mech plus eventually launching on consoles and other platforms, including the Epic Games Store. We encourage people to follow development on X and Discord where we’re very active in interacting with the community and providing sneak peeks into what’s coming in the future.